Abby Lawson
@AbsLawson
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Research ecologist with the federal government. Alaskan, #birds, #alligators, #DecisionScience, and dogs.
New Mexico
Joined March 2015
Second paper from my PhD has finally dropped on @ESAEcosphere! #OpenAccess Hidden in plain sight: Integrated population models to resolve partially observable latent population structure aka: the #alligator modeling paper 🐊 📈 https://t.co/Qqv7o9mtLv 1/n
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Population models often require detailed information on sex-, age-, or size-specific abundances, but population monitoring programs cannot always acquire data at the desired resolution. Thus, state...
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Ahem, is this thing on? 🎤 My account was hacked last week, 0/10 would not recommend Sorry to those of you who were spammed about gaming and blockchain… was tough to watch that play out from afar Back now, to tweet about science, but mostly dogs (if I’m being honest)
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📣📣 MASTER'S POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT 📣📣 See full announcement here: https://t.co/WwFaLktThL. Pls share widely!
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And one more new grad student. Whitney Watson is from Minneapolis, received her BS from Macalester College and her MS from U Wisc-Madison. Her PhD w/ Abby Lawson & Tim Wright will examine the ecology of rosy-finches in northern New Mexico
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Field day for the Lawson Lab! Heather Zimba (MS student) and Erica Christensen (postdoc), and I checked out prospective release sites for Bolson tortoises on @USFWSRefuges! 🐢
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Now online in @ESAApplications: Qualitative value of information provides a transparent and repeatable method for identifying critical uncertainty https://t.co/RN9opyFdoy With #OpenData in @USGS' #ScienceBase
#DecisionScience @mlstantial @AbsLawson @mcr_evpi @RallidaeRule
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These are the female faculty of @nmsu_fwce. What an awesome group of smart and talented women scientists! @theresalaverty, @JenniferKFrey, Martha Desmond, @AbsLawson, Wiebke Boeing, Colleen Caldwell, soon to come @KCPregler
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A new #alligator study uses a Bayesian #IntegratedPopulationModel to harness multiple data sources, generating abundance estimates of each size class over time https://t.co/KfoL8JbQeG
#OpenAccess @AbsLawson @KyleeDunham @USGSCoopUnits @USGS @nmsu_fwce @SCDNR @SCCoopUnit
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Second paper from my PhD has finally dropped on @ESAEcosphere! #OpenAccess Hidden in plain sight: Integrated population models to resolve partially observable latent population structure aka: the #alligator modeling paper 🐊 📈 https://t.co/Qqv7o9mtLv 1/n
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Population models often require detailed information on sex-, age-, or size-specific abundances, but population monitoring programs cannot always acquire data at the desired resolution. Thus, state...
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For now, just a huge shout-out to the village (more like mid-sized city?) it took to get this paper out: Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. All animals handled with proper permits and training. 9/9
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On a personal note, this paper was a BEAST. It's coming out just ~4 years shy from my PhD defense For long-time followers, any tweets related to a code meltdown during my PhD: this was why Plan to do a thread about what goes into a paper like this #paperbehindthepaper 8/n
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So what did we find? Contrasting trends in overall + size class-specific abundance at two sites; possibly from hunting The largest alligators on one site declined by 50% from 2011-2016 🐊 You should definitely check out the paper to read more! https://t.co/ylf8W8F9kU 7/n
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So how can we solve "Demographic Resolution Mismatch"? #Bayesian integrated population models (IPM) to the rescue! By linking coarse count data to mark-recapture data (in which size is known), we were able to estimate size class-specific abundance as inferred parameters 6/n
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In our paper, we term this problem "Demographic Resolution Mismatch" When your monitoring data are collected at a coarser demographic "resolution" (e.g., total individuals) than the scale needed to inform decision making (e.g., size class-specific abundance) 5/n
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Nightlight (eyeshine) surveys are the main technique to monitor alligator abundance But here's the problem, most data points (>60%) look like this— alligators of unknown size Tough to detect trends in a variable that's only partly observable 📸David Moynihan 4/n
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Alligators are sensitive to over-harvest and have determinate growth (like people), bigger gators valuable for hunting, reproduction So monitoring popl'n trends at the size class level is important to detect changes in population structure 3/n
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This paper has literally been decades in the making We used mark-recap data dating back to the 1970s, along with contemporary harvest records, nesting data, and nightlight counts to evaluate #alligator size class-specific abundance trends But wait, it wasn't that simple! 2/n
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Thrilled to be joining @nmsu_fwce & @USGSCoopUnits this summer in Las Cruces! Our lab will be researching applications of genetic/evolutionary rescue for conservation of imperiled species & fish population ecology. Stay tuned for lab member recruitment in fall/spring 23/24! 🐟💦
FWCE is excited that Dr. Kasey Pregler will be joining us later this year as NM USGS Fish & Wildlife Coop Unit's new Asst Unit Leader & NMSU Affiliate Asst Prof. Dr Pregler's expertise includes fish ecology, genetics & conservation. Great to have Dr. Pregler coming to NMSU!
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Hey, my colleagues in @NECFWRU @USGSCoopUnits are looking for an ecological modeler! Our @UNLSNR Applied Ecology faculty group is impactful and collaborative. Check it out here:
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For those keeping track at home, yes, this is the second year in a row that something weird has happened during my TWS recording... Learned from my mistake last year and kept the video off! https://t.co/qElKASlQgA
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