Keenan Stears

I am a wildlife ecologist who strives to understand the mechanisms that explain large mammal habitat use and their distributions across multiple spatial scales. Globally, anthropogenic 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 causes, influence large mammals and how these changes may be mitigated by management.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara and the South African Environmental Observation Network. 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.

1) Hippopotamus amphibius movements along the Great Ruaha River, Tanzania over a two week period,
2) Mixed-species herding is a behaviorally-mediated response of prey species to predation risk, and
3) Combining remotely sensed and on-the-ground data collection to model herbivore habitat use