Dr. Scott Yanco
Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
Date: October 16th, 2026
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Science Building 1111
The Ecology of Death: What Tracking Individual Animals Reveals About Population Decline
Wildlife populations are declining worldwide. Yet, for most species we don’t know why because most biodiversity monitoring overwhelmingly focuses on documenting the patterns of declines and not on the processes driving them. Cutting-edge sensors that track individual animals are changing that by allowing researchers to follow individual animals through their lives and, increasingly, their deaths. This means that we can now link animals' behaviors and experiences of their environments to the demographic processes governing population dynamics. This talk will show how movement, especially seasonal migration, reshapes the environments animals experience and, in turn, their physiology and life history. It will then show how human activities disrupt these relationships, drawing on a continent-scale study disentangling the effects of human presence from landscape modification across dozens of bird and mammal species. Finally, it will introduce the emerging "ecology of death" research program, anchored by the Global Animal Mortality Project, that uses tracking data from around the world to ask not only how animals die, but why in order to both inform basic ecological insights and support effective conservation policy and action.