Another year has passed, and I can FEEL IT. At one point the number of graduate students in the lab reached the double digits (10!), a number I hope to never reach again. :)

First and foremost, this was a year of CELEBRATION! The SPEC Lab graduated its first graduate students: Tyler Bostwick (M.S. thesis title: "Genomic Insights into Endangered Ocelot Populations to Inform Species Recovery"), Alexandria Hiott (M.S. thesis title: "Implications of Potential Disease Transmission Pathways to Endangered Ocelots in South Texas"), and Tori Locke (M.S. thesis title: "Ocelot Survival and Toxicity-Related Threats to Survival in South Texas, USA"). We also bid farewell to Shayla Haiflich, an undergraduate researcher in our lab. I can't wait to see what these exceptional young people do with the knowledge and skills they've accrued here. For one, Tori will be staying on as a Ph.D. student, which is a HUGE win for our ocelot team. She has long been our ocelot team lead in the field and our walking ocelot encyclopedia. 

This year, we published our first peer-reviewed manuscript from the SPEC Lab. This work was led by Assistant Research Professor Matt Smith and was titled, "Sex-specific resource strategies mediate home range sizes of an endangered carnivore across multiple scales." Congrats, Matt! You can read it (open access!) in Scientific Reports here. 

We were also lucky to welcome FOUR new graduate students into the fold, all of whom I know will make a major contribution to what we know about carnivore ecology and genomics in South Texas. Ray Turner, M.S. student on the South Texas Lion Project, already secured a Welder Wildlife Fellowship with his proposal, "Impacts of Linear Infrastructure on Mammal Communities in South Texas and Potential Mitigation Strategies." Way to go, Ray! Our other new students are Kyle Yorke, M.S. student, who will be investigating interspecific competition among ocelots, bobcats, and coyotes with and without the presence of ocelots in the system. He will also be working on the most efficient method of estimating carnivore densities. Truman Collins, M.S. student, will be assessing dietary niche space of ocelots and competing carnivores (bobcats, coyotes), and will also be conducting small mammal trapping to get a sense of prey availability on the landscape. Lastly, Tam Ta, M.S. student, will be working with ocelot genomic data and running scenarios to determine the most suitable founding population for the upcoming ocelot reintroduction. All four new students got to help out with some bobcat kitten collaring this past summer (see below!).

Fieldwork across our ocelot and mountain lion projects continued with great success. Our ocelot trapping team captured 10 individual ocelots this past season at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, and assisted East Foundation with their capture season at El Sauz Ranch. We also continued with our work monitoring bobcat dens and deploying trail cameras across ocelot habitat in South Texas. Thanks to our technician, Daniel Newman, for keeping things running out there! 

Lastly, we at the SPEC Lab were privileged to have been able to travel, both domestically and internationally, to present our research. Opportunities to present research brought us to Brisbane, Australia (where the SPEC Lab taught its "Geospatial Analysis in R" workshop), Edmonton, Canada, and to Ventura, CA, Salisbury, NC, Albuquerque, NM, Denton, TX, Del Rio, TX, Brownsville, TX, and San Antonio, TX. 

And, last but certainly not least, we were so grateful for our special guests: Dr. Beth Gardner, Associate Professor  at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, and Principal Investigator of the Quantitative Ecology Lab; and Emily Madsen, D.Phil. Candidate at the University of Oxford, U.K. Thank you for visiting us!

It has truly been an outstanding (but also exhausting) year. Bring it on, 2026!

I realized I haven't posted here in a while, which may give the impression nothing is going on -- the reality is that things are occurring at such breakneck speed it's impossible to slow down and post about all the great things that are happening.

At the moment, the SPEC Lab is MUCH bigger than it was one year ago. We have one Assistant Research Professor (Dr. Matt Smith), seven graduate students (James Helferich, Chloe Nouzille, Tori Locke, Tyler Bostwick, Alexandria Hiott, Katie McDaniel, and Zachary Wardle), two Program Managers (Robert Alonso and Ali Dart), three technicians (Ray Turner, Nicole Durtstchi, and the newly-arrived Katherine Campbell), a LEADING Undergraduate Scholar (Shayla Haiflich), and a number of paid undergraduate workers assisting our projects. 

Here are some highlights from the past year:

1. Our new hires! We were so happy to welcome Dr. Matt Smith (Assistant Research Professor), Ali Dart (SPEC Lab Ocelot Research Program Manager), and Robert Alonso (Texas Lion Project Program Manager) into the fold. Matt can do it all - genetics, population modeling, remote sensing - it's a joy to behold! He is working on some cool questions involving how ocelot and bobcat home range size and movements are impacted by climactic extremes such as severe drought. Ali came to us from the Travel Department at TAMUK and is keeping everyone on track with purchasing, hiring, reporting, and a multitude of other tasks. Robert is the trapping maestro of our Texas Lion Project and has been an absolutely pivotal team member for us. Without Robert, the level of success we are achieving would simply not be possible.

Life is pretty good down here in South Texas, and I'm grateful to have such a hard-working, wonderful team. Special thanks to US Customs and Border Protection, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, East Foundation, the Welder Wildlife Foundation, Boone and Crockett Club, Fort Worth Zoo, the landowners we are so privileged to work with, and our research partners across the country. Here's to more successes in 2025. 

​The SPEC Lab is *very* stoked to announce that we (Dr. Petracca and collaborators from the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, East Foundation, Borderlands Research Institute, Cincinnati Zoo, and Texas A&M University's Natural Resources Institute) have secured $13.9 million to support critical research into two elusive felid species of South Texas: ocelots (Leopardus pardalis) and mountain lions (Puma concolor).

Our research objectives currently include density estimation, insights into population genetics and disease transmission, population parameter estimation (e.g., survival, reproduction), exploration of interspecific dynamics, and gaining a better understanding of species habitat use and movement ecology. These questions are of particular interest in the context of the border wall between the United States and Mexico.

The SPEC Lab has already recruited an additional FIVE students (three M.S., two Ph.D.) to help answer these questions. Please stay tuned to learn more about their projects.

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I am really thrilled to report that the inner workings of the semi-spatial integrated population model for Washington State have finally been unveiled -- as part of the Fish and Wildlife Seminar Series (co-hosted by the University of Washington, Washington State University, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife) and, in a separate talk, to the Fish and Wildlife Commission and the general public. Please see here for a link to the Fish and Wildlife Seminar Series talk. Our final manuscript, in the works now, will certainly be improved from the feedback we got from both groups.  
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So what is this semi-spatial integrated population model all about? It's essentially a matrix population model and an individual-based model in one, something that hasn't been done before(!!). Our wolves move through time, living and getting older or dying (that's the matrix population model part), but also have opportunities to become "movers" and occupy new areas of the state (that's the individual-based model part). And, the best part is, this is all done within a single framework and fully driven by data from wolves in Washington.

We were also fortunate to test a variety of scenarios to assess the future trajectory of wolf populations in the state -- issues of management concern included harvest, disease, increased agency removals, reduced immigration from out of state, and translocation to the Mt. St. Helens Elk Herd Area and the Olympic Peninsula.

We are working hard to get this paper into peer review, and then published, so that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) can use our model to guide wolf management into the future.

As someone with 10+ years of experience in the ecology and conservation of big cats, I am a regular recipient of messages from young people about how to “break into” the world of big cat conservation. Circa 2010, I would respond to each message with great enthusiasm. Now I respond to very few of them, as I am more aware of how tough it is to get into the field – and how lucky I was to not only “get in” but also to find long-term employment.

The truth of the matter is that lots of young people (including myself a decade ago) are hypnotized by the exhilarating, wild world of big cat conservation. They imagine following tiger tracks deep into the jungles of Thailand, or driving a Land Rover straight across the path of a pride of lions feasting on a wildebeest. The charismatic nature of big cats, combined with their threatened conservation status, make big cats among the most popular megafauna – particularly to enthusiastic, wide-eyed conservation students.
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Here’s the reality. “Breaking into” the big cat world takes more than stellar grades, sacrifice, and a strong work ethic. It also takes luck, circumstance, and sometimes just being in the right place at the right time. However, it can be left a bit less to chance if you take some of the advice I have compiled below, based on my own experiences and the input of practicing conservation scientists on Twitter. My deepest thanks to those who contributed to my thread!

I close this post with a short summary of my own journey into the big cat world, as well as a selection of resources for budding big cat scientists. 
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​The one thing that will set you apart from other high-achieving applicants is your skillset. On the fieldwork side: do you have skills in wildlife tracking? Do you know how to set up and maintain camera traps? Can you drive stick-shift? (this is important for driving 4x4 vehicles, esp. in Africa). On the analytical side: do you have experience with lab-based genetic techniques? Do you have GIS skills? Can you code in R or Python? Do you have any experience in occupancy models, resource or step selection functions, or survival models? My skills in GIS got me my first opportunity at Panthera, and my skills in occupancy modeling got me my permanent position. There are so many people with degrees in Wildlife Management and Conservation Biology – you need that “X Factor” to truly stand out. 

Networking can be an uncomfortable thing, particularly for those of us who struggle with social anxiety, but networking is super critical in getting to know more established folks (and, yes, creating opportunities for yourself). Face-to-face meetings at international, national or regional conferences are far more meaningful than email exchanges and ultimately make yourself more memorable to the movers and shakers in the field. Good wildlife-centric conferences to attend (certainly not an exhaustive list!) include annual meetings of:

• The Wildlife Society
• American Society of Mammalogists
• Society for Conservation Biology (their annual conferences alternate between a North America-based conference and an international one)

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(3) BE PREPARED TO MAKE A FINANCIAL INVESTMENT
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​I know a lot of folks who got excellent international fieldwork experience via “pay-to-play” internships or volunteer opportunities, such that interns pay for airfare but often have lodging and/or incidentals covered. There are paid opportunities as well, but they are harder to find. The truth is, most international-based projects are cash-strapped and need all the financial support they can get. I know Marcella Kelly’s volunteer program has provided great opportunities for young people – Dr. Kelly is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech and has a long-running carnivore study in Belize.

There *are* opportunities out there – but PLEASE be wary of any experiences abroad that offer the chance to "walk with lions" or bottle-feed young animals. Chances are these projects are not associated with conserving wild populations and their habitats. Do your research. 

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(4) CONSIDER BLAZING YOUR OWN PATH

It is often the case that there are only a few, very competitive opportunities available – if so, you may want to consider creating your own niche. A friend of mine and conservation rock star, Tanya Rosen (MSc, JD, LL.M.) saw a conservation opportunity within Tajikistan and, after making the right connections, started some groundbreaking community-based conservation work there. As for me and my Ph.D., I knew I had the analytical skills and the data at hand to explore some new areas in the modeling of big cat data – so I shopped my project around until I found an advisor who was willing to take on a student who was not affiliated with an existing research project. It took time, and there were so many people who didn’t respond, but I ended up in a great program with a supportive advisor. 


(5) FOCUS ON THE QUESTION, NOT THE SPECIES
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​People in the Twitterverse were vocal in affirming that a prospective student/intern/employee’s focus should be more about the ecological question than the desire to work with a certain species. For example, I gained some valuable modeling experience in the big cat world that I am now applying to bats in my postdoctoral position, as we have the same underlying questions about multi-species activity patterns at multiple scales. The more broad your underlying research motivations, the more study species that can be at your fingertips!

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(6) THE IMAGINED VERSUS THE REALITY

 
Sure, I have had some super memorable field experiences abroad, but I am now a Conservation Scientist who spends 99% of her time coding and writing papers. Wildlife ecology is getting increasingly quantitative (the tools out there can make your head spin!), so while there are certainly field tech positions that will keep you in the field, the higher you go in the food chain, the less likely you are to spend a significant amount of time outside and among wildlife. In addition, much of big cat research is done remotely due to felids’ wide-ranging, elusive nature – via camera traps, track surveys, or GPS collars. I have written multiple papers on jaguars and have never seen them in the wild! So be prepared to spend a lot of time with a computer rather than cute jaguar cubs. 


(7) DON’T GIVE UP!
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​Getting a foot in the door is hard. If working in big cat conservation is what you truly want to do, be prepared to make sacrifices and to work hard, and take what sometimes seems to be constant rejection in stride. When I was looking for Ph.D. programs as a skilled candidate with five years of experience, I did not hear back from potential advisors more often than I did hear back. Now that I am a practicing Conservation Scientist, dealing with rejection is a part of my daily routine, whether it is rejection via manuscript submissions or grant proposals. As the famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton once said – “Through endurance we conquer!” 

First of all, who am I? I was a Geospatial Analyst at Panthera from 2010-2018, and a Conservation Scientist at the organization from 2018-2019. I am now a Roosevelt Postdoctoral Scholar at SUNY-ESF, where I have the opportunity to work on a variety of projects related to mammalian spatial ecology. First up: BATS!

My journey began when I was halfway through my Masters of Environmental Management (MEM) degree at Duke University. At the time (2009 – I was 25 years old), I was highly skilled in GIS and starting to curate my skills in quantitative modeling. I was seeking a paid summer opportunity that involved GIS work but also, yes, big cats. My reasons for being infatuated with big cats were truly no different from the reasons why so many young people write to me – big cats are striking, and mysterious, and they require urgent conservation attention. Luckily for me I had done a semester abroad in Tanzania as an undergrad (through the School for International Training), so I wasn’t a complete newbie to fieldwork and international conservation. My “luck” is that a recent grad from the same Duke program had just started a position at Panthera, the only non-profit in the world dedicated exclusively to the conservation of big cats. In my quest for a summer opportunity, I was introduced to him by email via my Duke advisor. This “connection” undoubtedly improved my visibility to someone who was likely inundated with similar requests. It just so happens that around that time, Panthera was looking for someone to lead fieldwork in southern Belize, interviewing local people about the presence of jaguars and their prey outside protected areas. I was chosen for the job (no salary, but all expenses paid for the three-month project duration). Fast forward one year, and they needed someone to do the same task within the Central Belize Corridor – I did that, too. 

My “biggest break” came when the Geospatial Analyst at Panthera (the Duke grad who gave me my first break) was leaving Panthera for other opportunities – he went on to get his Ph.D. at University College London and is now working in tiger conservation. In a rare event, the job opportunity was posted in the public domain (it is so often the case that non-profits have private hires – at least, this was the case with Panthera). I beat out dozens of people for the job – a permanent, paid position at *the* non-profit specializing in big cat conservation. There were certainly highly qualified and skilled people who applied for the position – why did I get it? My best guess is that I not only had the quantitative (GIS and occupancy modeling) and language (English/Spanish) skills they were looking for – I also had a history with them (this was clearly very major) AND happened to have an internet connection when the job window was still open (lucky for me, as I had just returned from a lion survey in Mozambique). The rest is history.

I figured I'd officially start my research updates with a BANG (yes, I acknowledge this is long overdue). I had two papers accepted as lead author this week, which is perhaps the only time in my professional career this will happen. 

First, we saw the publication of our novel community occupancy model for line transect data in Animal Conservation (link to the paper). Previously, models had existed for the analysis of line transect data within an occupancy framework for single species --- but no one had extended it so that multiple species could be analyzed together, allowing insights at both the species and community levels. We surveyed for wildlife within Luengue-Luiana and Mavinga National Parks, Angola, which happens to be the largest contiguous protected area complex within a single African country and is still recovering from the effects of the Angolan Civil War.  

Our team found sign for 13 large mammals (including lion, leopard, cheetah, spotted hyena, and wild dog), though the concentration of mammal sign was not evenly dispersed throughout the study area. We used our novel occupancy model to show that community-level occupancy was most strongly associated with anthropogenic factors --- more specifically the number of human sign, distance to human settlement, and distance to adjacent protected areas in Namibia and Zambia. These factors created an area of greatest species richness in the southern part of the complex, which also happens to be the site of ongoing and quite severe elephant poaching. Ecological factors, such as precipitation, vegetation cover, and seasonal water availability, had little explanatory value, underscoring the long-term effects that war and human intrusion into protected areas can have on shaping mammal communities. 

Our approach has obvious implications for the future management of this protected area complex and the conservation of the mammal assemblage within, but the methodology can be applied to any dataset for which you have line transect data for multiple species. Please see Appendix E in the paper for our model code if you wish to apply it to your own study system. 

Second, our paper on the efficacy of chasing African lions in order to reduce human-lion conflicts was published in Ecosphere (link to paper - it's open access!). ​This was a study based on a novel conflict mitigation program called the Hwange Long Shields Community Guardians Program, based outside Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, in which local residents are hired to chase GPS-collared African lions out of community lands. This program is managed by Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), and falls under WildCRU's Trans-Kalahari Predator Programme. The goals of this program are threefold: (1) to reduce the killing of livestock by lions, which represents a major economic loss to rural households, (2) to reduce the killing of lions in response to real or perceived livestock depredation events, and (3) to incentivize wildlife conservation by hiring local residents as "Community Guardians."

Our paper analyzed a database of 15 GPS-collared lions, each of which was chased between 0 and 17 times. We sought to understand (1) What factors were associated with lower rates of lions either re-entering community lands or depredating livestock?, and (2) What factors were associated with "successful" chases? (with "successful" being defined as pushing the lion out of community lands by 7 am of the next day). We used recurrent-event survival analysis for question #1, and logistic regression for question #2. 

First, we found that the biggest factor reducing rates of livestock depredation events was chase consistency. The more consistently that the lions are chased after killing livestock, the less likely they are to repeat that behavior. However, rates of livestock depredation increased when a given lion had a history of repeated livestock killing (in our study, livestock killers had killed an average of 29 animals, with one lion killing 56!). Taken together, these results indicate that consistency is key, though chronic livestock killers may display recalcitrant behaviors.

Our hope is that this paper will improve the evaluation of novel methods to reduce human-wildlife conflicts, and that the Community Guardians program can serve as an example of how to to successfully conserve wildlife while preserving rural livelihoods.