Emily Cohen

Postdoctoral Fellow / Migratory Bird Center

Research Focus

My postdoctoral research is part of the Migratory Connectivity Project, an initiative to conduct comprehensive life cycle analyses for wildlife. It is clear that ascertaining the health of migratory populations across large spatial scales requires an understanding of the geographic linkage of populations between stages of the annual cycle. I am using the 90-year band encounter database at the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory to develop models of migratory connectivity for North American bird species. A bird marked and recaptured at locations in its breeding, wintering, and stopover habitats gives us important information about the migratory connectivity of the population as a whole. Understanding the connectivity of populations becomes increasingly important as rapid changes in resource availability, air space, and climate due to unprecedented human activity may be inflating the risks associated with occupying disparate breeding and wintering areas.

Most Recent Publications

Cohen, Emily B., Moore, Frank R. and Fischer, Richard A. Experimental Evidence for the Interplay of Exogenous and Endogenous Factors on the Movement Ecology of a Migrating Songbird, PLoS ONE, 7 (7) 1-11. 2012.

View all publications, abstracts, and printable papers by Emily Cohen