Nathan Byer

Hi there! My name is Nathan Byer, and I am a PhD student at UW-Madison. I work at the intersection between ecology and conservation biology to develop conservation strategies to protect sensitive species. I leverage statistics, geospatial techniques, ecology, population biology, and genetics to confront the most troublesome threats to biodiversity today - human-caused land use alterations and climate change. To this end, my PhD dissertation focuses on how land use and climate change may impact population persistence, genetic diversity, and behavior for a group of organisms that may be particularly sensitive to environmental change - turtles!

Although turtles are often understudied, they have several fascinating characteristics - such as their long lives, low reproductive output, and cold-blooded lifestyle - that make them particularly vulnerable and slow to respond to environmental change. Throughout my career, I have worked on a wide variety of turtle species and conservation-minded research questions. For my Master's thesis in Dr. Richard Seigel's lab at Towson University, I studied the nesting ecology of the Bog Turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii ), a federally-listed freshwater turtle and possibly one of the most vulnerable reptiles in the country. Other projects that I have worked on include: assessing the impacts of a large dam on the Map Turtle; documenting population trends for turtles at Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge; and determining the impacts of a highway project on the Eastern Box Turtle.

For more information on my work, you can access the following links:

Lab Page

ResearchGate

Thank you for your interest, and please let me know if you have any questions!

Nathan Byer

nbyer@wisc.edu

August 2016