Presentation Summary

As environmental conditions change, understanding how wild animals adjust their foraging behavior is increasingly important. In this presentation, Jack will demonstrate how stable isotopes have been used to study bear diets and how laser ablation stable isotope analysis can improve our understanding of wildlife foraging ecology, including dietary shifts, wildlife–habitat relationships, and the risks associated with foraging for anthropogenic foods.

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Check out Dr. Hopkins’ courses here and here.

Presenter Bio

Jack Hopkins is a wildlife ecologist who is broadly interested in understanding how animals respond to human impacts and a changing environment. He primarily uses stable isotopes and other chemical tracers in combination with a variety of field methods and statistical approaches to investigate species interactions, wildlife-habitat relationships, and the foraging behavior of carnivores. He is also currently active in using chemical data from laser ablation mass spectrometry to develop statistical models for applications in wildlife forensics. Much of Jack’s research is motivated by the needs of state, federal, provincial, or tribal agencies. As such, informing wildlife conservation, management, and policy is often the primary goal of his research.

Before co-founding CWS, Jack worked as a faculty member at Unity College and as a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC San Diego, UC Merced, University of Alberta, and Peking University in China. Before that, he worked as a field biologist for nearly a decade in Yosemite and U.S. Virgin Islands National Parks as well as the U.S. Forest Service and USGS in Montana.