Friends of Panthertown Webinar: Avery Shawler Wolves & Elk Research (May 28)

Avery Shawler is a PhD student at the University of California Berkeley studying how elk migrations affect patterns of wolf-livestock conflict. Her study area is in Cody, Wyoming, which is on the eastern frontier of Yellowstone National Park, and where she conducts winter and summer field seasons investigating wolf GPS locations. She grew up all over the world, but is from Cashiers, North Carolina, and spent a lot of her childhood recreating in Panthertown and other surrounding areas.

In her talk Avery tells us about her research and also give a glimpse of what it’s like to lead field research in a rugged place with the highest density of grizzly bears in the lower 48. She will also talk about how her research in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem relates to wildlife management in western North Carolina, where wildlife populations are also expanding, leading to more encounters with humans.

Avery got her B.A. in Conservation Biology at Middlebury College in Vermont, and before graduate school she was working as an independent contractor in Idaho where she worked with several conservation nonprofits including the Idaho Conservation League, The Nature Conservancy, and the Central Idaho Rangelands Network. She was also the Project Coordinator for a predator-livestock coexistence collaborative, the Wood River Wolf Project, which is how she first learned about the many challenges of managing wolf-livestock conflict. She is currently a PhD candidate at U.C. Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

This webinar was recorded LIVE on Thursday May 28th, 2020. View Avery’s presentation to hear about capturing and GPS collaring wolves, tracking one of the world’s most spectacular elk migrations, challenges of coexisting with wildlife, and more!

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session with Avery.

Visit Avery’s website for more information about her research.