Affiliates

PiE Affiliates provides a means for participation and collaboration with other interested individuals, both on and off campus. Affiliates can include non-tenure-track faculty at Wyoming, tenure-track faculty whose research interests overlap with ecology, and ecologists from off- campus entities who work closely with PiE faculty and students.


	Ed Barbier Professor Economics and Finance E-mail: ebarbier@uwyo.edu Web Page: http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/barbier
One of my key research interests has been advancing the economic analysis of jointly determined ecological-economic systems, which is now commonly referred to as “ecological economics”. My main focus has been on developing methods to analyze and value ecosystem services, or the benefits generated by key ecological regulatory and habitat functions. I have developed such methods for analyzing the storm protection service and habit-fishery linkages of coastal wetlands. I have also conducted collaborative research with ecologists on sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, wildlife management and invasive species, mostly in tropical environments.
	Gary Beauvais Director Wyoming Natural Diversity Database E-mail: beauvais@uwyo.edu Web Page: www.uwyo.edu/wyndd
I am the Director of the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, a service and research unit of the University of Wyoming and a member of the network of State Natural Heritage Programs. Our mission is to develop and disseminate comprehensive information on the distribution, natural history, and status of rare plants, rare animals, and important vegetation communities in Wyoming. My primary research interests are the biogeography, habitat use, and conservation of vertebrate wildlife in Wyoming and surrounding states. Most recently I have established a program of producing predictive distribution models and maps for several rare taxa in the region. Such maps have become very useful to natural resource managers and conservationists, and are good examples of how large and complicated masses of technical data can be processed into products that directly inform and influence on-ground activities. I am interested in exploring additional ways to help bridge the gap between ecological researchers and natural resource managers.
	Gordon Bonan Senior Scientist Climate & Global Dynamics Division National Center for Atmospheric Research E-mail: bonan@ucar.edu Web Page: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/tss/aboutus/staff/bonan
My research examines land-atmosphere interactions, especially the ecological, hydrological, and biogeochemical processes by which terrestrial ecosystems affect climate. I study natural and human changes in land cover and ecosystems functions and their effects on climate, water resources, and biogeochemistry. I develop and use climate, hydrological, and ecosystem models to study the influence of the biosphere on climate.
	Peter Brown Director Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research E-mail: pmb@rmtrr.org Web Page: http://www.rmtrr.org
I am the Director of Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, a Colorado nonprofit corporation that I founded in 1997. For the past several semesters, I also have been teaching classes and seminars in fire and forest ecology, dendrochronology, and global climate change as an affiliate faculty member at Colorado State University. My main research interests revolve around how climate variation and land use affects ecosystem dynamics over seasonal to multi-centennial time scales, and how such information can be used in ecosystem management and ecological restoration. Current and recent projects involve reconstructing fire history, fire climatology, and forest dynamics in forests of the western US, the Lake States, Mexico, and Mongolia.
	Anna Chalfoun Research Scientist Department of Zoology & Physiology and WY Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit E-mail: achalfou@uwyo.edu Web Page: https://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/Zoology/faculty/chalfoun
I study wildlife-habitat relationships and the ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary processes underlying patterns in habitat use and quality at multiple spatial scales. My lab is currently focused on the influence of anthropogenic changes to habitats (e.g., via oil and natural gas extraction) on non-game wildlife species including songbirds, small mammals and herpetofauna, especially within sagebrush systems. My work has also focused on broad scale life history patterns and avian parental care behaviors.
	Stephen Gray Director, Water Resources Data System Wyoming State Climatologist E-mail: stateclim@wrds.uwyo.edu Web Page: http://wwweng.uwyo.edu/civil/faculty/gray.html
My primary responsibilities at the University of Wyoming are to serve as Director of the Wyoming Water Resources Data System and Wyoming State Climatologist. I am also an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering. The majority of my research concentrates on ecosystem responses to climate variability and climate change over decadal to multidecadal time scales. As part of this work I have developed a network of millennial-length tree-ring chronologies from sites throughout the Interior West. When combined with other paleo archives, these tree-ring records offer a unique perspective on how climate drives environmental change. My work also explores the interplay between climate variability/change and natural resource management.
	Alex Guenther Senior Scientist The Institute for Integrate and Multidisciplinary Earth Studies and the Atmospheric Chemistry Division National Center for Atmospheric Research Email: guenther@ucar.edu Web page: http://acd.ucar.edu/~guenther
I am interested in the chemical, physical and biological processes that control biosphere-atmosphere interactions, especially the role of surface-atmosphere trace gas exchange in ecology and atmospheric chemistry. I conduct field and greenhouse studies of the emission and uptake of Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) and other trace gases and develop large-scale models of these fluxes that can be integrated into air quality and climate models. Current projects include comparing the relative importance of VOC emissions in tropical, temperate and boreal landscapes; examining the ecological roles of plant signaling compounds and determining their impact on the atmosphere; investigating atmospheric bioaerosol production and feedbacks; and mapping plant species distributions in order to quantify their impact on trace gas and aerosol exchange.
	David Liberles Assistant Professor Department of Molecular Biology E-mail: liberles@uwyo.edu
As species diverge, specific molecular changes drive phenotypic changes and ultimately adaptation. Understanding the mechanism of the evolution of new functionality in genomes and how this correlates with the phenotypic divergence of species is the central theme of my research group. Important genomic events include horizontal transfer, gene duplication, sequence divergence, gene expression divergence, mRNA splicing pattern divergence, and a host of other mechanisms. We focus on detecting and collating these different events in a phylogenetic perspective, developing and applying methods, at the DNA and protein sequence levels using parsimony and maximum likelihood methodologies, at protein structural levels, and at systems network levels.
	ZongBo Shang Assistant Research Scientist, WyGISC Assistant Research Scientist, Geography Email: zshang1@uwyo.edu Web Page: http://www.sdvc.uwyo.edu/ecoinformatics/index.htm
I am interested in a wide range of studies on ecological informatics, Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and applications, landscape ecology and spatial modeling, forest ecology and management, and global change effects on terrestrial ecosystem, etc. Several undergoing and potential studies include: 1) developing a GIS-based spatial pattern analysis tool, 2) developing a forest ecology and planning system, 3) decision-support systems, 4) scientific workflow and applications in ecological modeling, and 5) geospatial data and information technology support.
	Scott R. Shaw Professor of Entomology and Curator of the U.W. Insect Museum Department of Renewable Resources E-mail: braconid@uwyo.edu Web Page: http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/RenewableResources/entomology/shaw.htm
My research focuses on the systematics, ecology, and behavior of parasitoid wasps, especially the hyper-diverse insect family Braconidae (with an estimated 50,000+ species worldwide). Braconid wasps are among the most economically-beneficial of all insect groups. Their larvae feed on (and kill) the larvae of other insects, especially plant-feeding moths, beetles, and flies. The insect family Braconidae has been more successfully utilized in classical biological control programs than any other beneficial insect group. My research on Braconidae in Wyoming studies the systematics and ecology of wasp species that suppress populations of caterpillars and bark beetles in western forests. Other current research is an NSF-funded project to study the tri-trophic interactions of plants, plant-feeding caterpillars, and caterpillar-feeding wasps at the Yanayacu Research Station in Ecuador, a hyper-diverse cloud forest site on the eastern slope of the Andes.
	John Tschirhart Professor of Economics and Director of the Public Utility Research and Training Institute (PURTI) at the University of Wyoming Department of Renewable Resources E-mail: jtsch@uwyo.edu Web Page: http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/tschirhart
My interest is to develop models that integrate economics and ecology. If ecology is the study of the structure and function of nature (Odum, 1971), then and over time ecologists may have less and less to study. This state of affairs is supported by evidence in popular and scientific publications about the decline of natural systems, and the primary cause of decline is the increasing per-capita resource consumption of increasing numbers of Homo sapiens. Most of this consumption involves economic activity, so an important step to reversing the decline of natural systems is to understand how natural and economic systems interact. To date I have integrated economic models with general equilibrium ecosystem models of marine and terrestrial systems to examine ecosystem based management of fisheries in the Eastern Bering Sea (NMFS and EPA funded), grazing policies on western rangelands (USDA funded), invasive species and endangered species programs, estuary alga blooms induced by agricultural runoff in the Southeast (EPA supported) , and the worst rodent infestation in U.S. history - a house mouse invasion in California, circa 1926. I am also on the scientific committee of DIVERSITAS, an international organization headquartered in Paris that is devoted to the study of biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services.

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