Keenan Stears

I am a wildlife ecologist who strives to understand the mechanisms that explain wildlife habitat use and their distributions across multiple spatial scales. Globally, anthropogenic and climate-driven impacts are transforming environments and ecosystems, endangering wildlife species, communities and ecosystems, and have escalated human-wildlife conflicts. Thus, much of my research program focuses on how local and global changes, resulting from anthropogenic and climate-driven causes, influence wildlife species and how these changes may be mitigated by management. My current research aims to understand how disturbance-driven changes in behavior affect multiple levels of ecological organization, scaling from individuals to their populations, communities, and ecosystems.

I am currently a faculty member in the Department of Biology at the University of North Dakota as well as a research affiliate at the University of Mpumalanga (South Africa). Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara and the South African Environmental Observation Network.