New paper - What could the next 20 years of wildlife tracking look like. Our horizon scan, out today in Proc Royal Soc B, maps out 28 innovations to unlock movement ecology's untapped potential. wildlabs.net/en/article/o...

The last paddle of our Lewis & Clark resurvey took us through a forest of fish trap pilings in Baker Bay. The traps were banned in 1934 but the poles testify to the massive scale of this unsustainable fishery rolandkays.com/paddling-bak...

Wildlife Insights is hiring an Executive Director. Lead the global camera trap data platform, its AI, its science agenda, and its partnership with WCS smithsonian WWF NaturalSciences WildMon & Google www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/44...

Postdoc opportunity with Alex Jensen at Texas State University is hiring a postdoc in wildlife/macroecology. Range dynamics, citizen science & computer vision using iNaturalist data. $60K/yr + benefits, 2 yrs funding. Start early 2027. Apply by 9/30/26: alexjojensen.weebly.com

Retracing Lewis & Clark down the Columbia. They portaged the Cascades in 1805. Bonneville Dam drowned those rapids so we easily paddled through. Watched salmon climb the fish ladder past the counting windows. But 8 dams to the ocean, and it adds up.https://rolandkays.com/paddling-from-bonneville/

Beavers build better fish habitat than we do! This awesome dam complex on Idaho state land creates the deep pools and floodplain storage that steelhead need, plus acts as fire resilient sponge 🦫🐟🌲🔥https://rolandkays.com/state-lands-the-beaver-built-salmon-streams/

At Canoe Camp on the Clearwater, Lewis & Clark built dugouts and ran the first serious rapids of their trip. We paddled the same water 221 years later and sat down with Nez Perce experts to learn what's happened to the salmon since. rolandkays.com/padding-the-...

Grizzly, wolf, mountain lion, elk — almost the full cast Lewis & Clark saw here is still on the Rocky Mountain front. We spent a day checking trail cameras on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch with Boone and Crockett Club. The cameras don't lie. rolandkays.com/roosevelt-ranch-predators/

Stop 2 of our Lewis and Clark Resurvey was to launch or canoes down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, just like Merriweather Lewis did. rolandkays.com/pittsburgh-p...

Observing a free-ranging bison herd on American Prairie lands was the wildlife moment of the trip. The northern Montana grasslands are closer to what Lewis & Clark described than almost anywhere else. Our resurvey cameras are now running here too. rolandkays.com/prairie-conservation/

Students from Aaniiih Nakoda College helped us deploy camera traps on the Fort Belknap Reservation as part of the Smithsonian's Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey. Bison, swift fox, black-footed ferrets — this prairie has it all. rolandkays.com/prairie-conservation/

Students from Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College just deployed 40 camera traps across the Fort Berthold Reservation as part of the Smithsonian's Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey + tribal wildlife program. Can't wait to see what turns up! rolandkays.com/nueta-hidatsa-sahnish-college-camera-traps/

Prairie dogs have the worst PR team! They run matriarchal colonies, communicate w sophisticated alarm system, and engineer habitat that bison, ferrets, owls, and badgers all depend on. Meanwhile Capybara just vibing & have more followers rolandkays.com/sdsu-prairie-dogs/ @AECheeseman

Meriwether Lewis: "the river is wide, full of large sandbars, the water very rapid and of a yellowish brown colour. Its banks are falling in." Standing on the same Missouri River sandbars today, it fits! One of the only places on the route where that's true rolandkays.com/goat-island-ponca

Lewis & Clark heard their first coyote near here in 1804 a "prairie wolf barking at us as we passed." Now Teresa Graham from Little Priest Tribal College is running camera traps at the same spot, and coyotes are still showing up. 🐺📷 rolandkays.com/adams-homestead

Stop 4: Seeing William Clark's original field journal at the Missouri History Museum. Elkskin binding worn smooth by two years on the trail. Every species we're documenting today started as an entry on these pages. rolandkays.com/forest-park/

Stop 5 of the Lewis and Clark Reurvey: pushing upstream out of St. Louis against the same river currents Lewis and Clark fought for 2,000 miles. Even a few miles is humbling. Reward: 11 bald eagles and a duckling that jumped in our boat to escape one. rolandkays.com/paddling-ups...

Stop 3 of the Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey: Tom's Run, WV. Fisher are back. The forest is back. But without wolves or mountain lions, deer have hit ~40 per sq mi, twice a healthy target. Tree saplings need a plastic tube to survive. rolandkays.com/university-o...

Stop 1 of the Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey: a fisher walked into our western PA cameras on its own, a species trapped to extinction here that's quietly returning. Plus beavers, breeding sandhill cranes, and three canid species. rolandkays.com/barkasky-farm/

The Path Forward: Managing this "post-peak humanity" world requires: • ✅ Non-lethal conflict mitigation (fencing, deterrents). • ✅ Incentivizing regulated hunting. • ✅ Proactive monitoring of recovering populations.

/ As people move to cities and rural populations decline, abandoned farmland is returning to forest. This "land abandonment" provides the perfect habitat for large herbivores and their predators to reclaim old territory. 📊 The Data

🧵 A surprising wildlife trend is emerging that could be a sign of the future: large mammals are making a massive comeback in parts of Europe and Japan. The driver? Human depopulation in rural areas. New paper: 🔗 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🐺🐻‍❄️🦌🫎🦃🦅🐒🦝🦫🦬🐘🦉🐿️🦨🦡🐾🦎📷🧬 Hiring: Biodiversity Lab Manager @NaturalSciences Anticipated opening this summer Help run our on-exhibit Lab in Raleigh MS required Sign up for an alert when it goes live #cameratraps #AI #computervision docs.google.com/forms/d/1nrS...

Coyote Crossing premiers April 20 at 7 PM on @pbs.org covering the story of Canis latrans from tar pits to neighborhoods, and including a short appearance by me and my cat robot

Meet the champ. Broad diet, broad habitat tolerance, fast reproduction — Peromyscus are the ultimate generalists. They're also the primary reservoir for Lyme disease and hantavirus. When one genus dominates community structure, that has consequences beyond just the ecology.

This plays out across the continent. East of the Rockies especially, one genus is structuring entire small mammal communities. The dominance fades west, but it's still there in most regions Peromyscus occurs.

That something else: raw abundance. Peromyscus (mainly P. leucopus, P. maniculatus, and P. gossypinus) were the sole dominant entity at 53% of sites — accounting for 58% of total interaction strength on average. Coexistence theory predicted them as dominant at 0% of sites.

Classic coexistence theory says overlap of species traits — diet, habitat breadth, body size, life history — should predict who competes hardest with whom. We tested that. It didn't hold up well. Something else was driving community structure.

We used NEON data: 68 species, 44 sites across the US, 7 years of abundance estimates. This isn't one forest in New England. This is everywhere.

If you've ever run a live trap in the eastern US, you know the feeling: open the box, and it's another deer mouse. New paper out: Peromyscus isn't just common at your site — they're dominating small mammal communities continent-wide. 🧵