Research Interest

My research interests encompass a variety of general ecological aspects of vertebrate natural history, with a primary focus on small mammals.  Much of my work includes a characterization of small mammal communities, with work carried out in the US (primarily Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma) and more recently Botswana.  I have conducted populational studies on a number of rodent and bat species, with extensive work on the Mexican free-tailed bat.  Work on the Mexican free-tailed bat has included pesticide bioaccumulation studies in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, as well as more recent efforts to help provide alternative roost structures for a colony of bats in Huntsville, TX, that currently occupy a condemned building.  Work in Botswana includes morphological and genetic analyses of small mammals (also primarily rodents) with a directed effort to try and determine how annual wildfires affect population structure.  We are also examining the differences between species assemblages of small mammals obtained through standard trapping techniques and recovery of barn owl pellets with an ultimate goal of assessing reliability of paleoenvironmental climate reconstruction in southern Africa using small mammal fossils as proxies for environmental conditions.