Ecology and conservation biology.
A young Grasshopper Sparrow surveys its hayfield habitat in central New Jersey.
About me
I’m an ecologist and conservation biologist with a PhD in Ecology & Evolution. I work as a research scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey where I lead projects advancing environmental conservation and management. I also teach undergraduate courses (mainly Ornithology). Previously, I worked for 10 years as a researcher at a conservation non-profit.
I’m interested in animal populations and how they change in time and space, especially as it applies to environmental conservation and invasive species. My work involves merging novel applications of ‘big data’, statistical models, and molecular tools with ecological theory to improve the way we monitor biodiversity, understand species distributions and population dynamics, and plan for the impacts of global change. Read more about my Research here →.
In my free time, I enjoy hanging out with my kids, hiking, skiing, camping, birding, botanizing, growing food, and playing music. I also like coding. See that section above for hopefully useful things related to my research and conservation data visualization.
A ‘meta-model’ showing potential causal relationships among factors affecting Grasshopper Sparrow populations. Icons in the figures are from The Noun Project (Anton, S. Demushkin, G. Furtado, Hamish, Humantech, P. Rozenberg).
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
— G. Bernard Shaw, Playwright
Feel free to contact me with ideas or anything else! michael.allen@rutgers.edu