Sarah B. Bassing, PhD

🐺 Advantageous snow conditions – in terms of snow depth and density – are among the most important features of the winter landscape for two apex predators, regardless of hunting strategy.

Read the full paper here ➡️ buff.ly/pXSMNRK

Northern lights over a house

Northern lights viewed through tree branches

Northern lights viewed through tree branches

Northern lights over a house

Aurora borealis over Bozeman! Amazing!

My students chose to stay an extra 10 minutes past the end of class so we could finish going over how to fit linear models in R today. One even said they thought it was fun. 🥹 Makes all the work of lesson planning worth it.

Monty Python understood p-hacking

Congratulations!

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The #NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program #GRFP solicitation is coming soon!

The due date for Life Sciences proposals is 27 October 2025.

For more info: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October)
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Looking forward to reading this!

When I first studied statistics in high school, it appeared to me not as a revelation, but as a jumble of bizarre formulas that defied explanation. I could not for the life of me make sense of it. The calculations were mechanical and joyless. Compared to the elegance of physics, these equations felt unappealing, artificial, and just plain wrong. There was no reasoning to follow, only rules to memorize. I decided with absolute finality: statistics was not for me.

Read it here: open.substack.com/pub/kareemca...

Applicant FAQ Webinar 2026 An overview of the fellowship, application process, and selection process, followed by common questions and answers, and an open Q&A session hosted by Smith…

Thinking about applying for the Smith Fellowship? Watch the recording of our FAQ Webinar for answers to common questions and insights to strengthen your application here: vimeo.com/1111487510?s...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Two people wearing backpacks stand together in a large open meadow with conifer forests and mountains in the background.

Scat from an adult wolf on the forest floor. A black lighter is next to the scat for scale.

Woman holds a broken skull from a long dead bull elk while standing in a forest.

A scat from a wolf pup sits in a matted down patch of grass in a meadow where pups have been playing. Pine trees and willow shrubs in the background.

One last outing this field season with my incoming graduate student. We collected genetic samples from wolf scat and hiked through some beautiful country. Looking forward to the start of the semester and getting this project officially started!

Sample size considerations for species co‐occurrence models Multispecies occupancy models are widely applied to infer interactions in the occurrence of different species, but convergence and estimation issues under realistic sample sizes are common. We conduc...

📝 Are you using multispecies occupancy models to investigate interactions in species occupancy (i.e. co-occurrence)? 🦁🦓

Check out our new paper for advice on the number of sites you need to reliably detect interactions under different scenarios ⬇️

I’ve had that happen before too. The editor was able to reopen it for me. I’m sure they’ll be able to do the same thing for you. Still frustrating though after all that hard work to revise and resubmit!

Are you an early-career biologist or ecologist who would benefit from an invited seminar? Would you like to come to UMaine next fall or spring to give a talk? Leave a brief comment with some info about what you do. I'm co-hosting our seminar series again, and am filling out our rosters.

I’m honored and excited to be presenting in the “Quantitative Methods for Predator-Prey Interactions” section of this conference. The GRCs are small and have a unique format that makes them something truly special. Check out the link below for more details and to register.

With many postdoc grants like the NSF PRFB, Ford Fellowship, and Hanna H. Gray fellowships disappearing, I am currently looking for grants that could fund incoming postdoctoral scholars. Here is a thread of some of them 🧵

I am making a Starter Pack for people who are looking for PHD STUDENT POSITIONS in the biological sciences! If you wish to be added, please respond directly to this post saying you want to be added. I need at least 5 people to create the pack. Please share widely!

Need to update your data? Follow these five tips Researchers engaged in long-term projects often need to update their data sets over time. Here’s how to do it while maintaining reproducibility.

I really appreciate being given the opportunity to contribute to this Nature article on best practices for versioning shared data! 🫱📂🫲

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Nice collection of articles about AI and the many challenges it presents.

I've been interested in uncertainty visualization for a long time, yet somehow it took forever to come across this 2018 paper on ‘value-suppressed uncertainty palettes’.

A neat and intuitive alternative to the clunky ‘unsuppressed’ bivariate palette approach:

doi.org/10.1145/3173... 🧪 #dataviz

#bioacoustics community: do you know any online platforms for volunteers to join an acoustics project, validate and label acoustic data (e.g. birdnet detections, false negatives), filter for specific species etc? I asked this a few yrs ago but nothing of the sort existed...

This was a collaborative effort btwn the US Fish & Wildlife Service, AZ Game & Fish Dept, NM Dept of Game & Fish, Univ of Idaho, & US Geological Survey Idaho Coop Fish & Wildlife Research Unit. Big thank you to the Mexican Wolf Interagency Field Team for documenting so many dens & rendezvous sites!

Two maps depicting the predicted den RSF (top map) and the predicted rendezvous site RSF (bottom map) in the portions of AZ and NM currently occupied by Mexican wolves. Darker red indicated highly suitable habitat, light yellow to white indicates least suitable habitat, and gray indicates regions that were not predicted across.

Map of Arizona and New Mexico, highlighting the three Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Areas (MWEPA) recovery zones and the study area's perimeter (red dashed polygon).

We then predicted the top den & rendezvous site RSFs across the occupied range of Mexican wolves in AZ & NM. We used K-fold cross validation to assess the predictive capacity of the models. Both were highly predictive, with denning habitat being more predictable then rendezvous site habitat.

Figure depicting maps of the variables included in the best supported den RSF and corresponding density plots showing the spread of each variable based on the used vs available locations included in the model. Variables include elevation, slope, distance to nearest water, terrain ruggedness, and distance to nearest road.

Using location data from >330 pup-rearing sites, we built RSFs to test hypotheses about what influences site selection. In a nutshell, features associated w/ physical protection & access to reliable H20 were most important, although the exact variables differed between site types.

TWS Journals We developed predictive models of pup-rearing habitat (i.e., den and rendezvous sites) that could help guide future population monitoring efforts of Mexican wolves. Mexican wolves selected den sites ...

‼️New 🐺 paper‼️We developed models to predict highly suitable den & rendezvous site habitat for Mexican wolves in AZ & NM. These models will be used to guide future monitoring as the population continues to grow. #OpenAccess #JournalOfWildlifeManagement wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Very cool conservation science here. Congrats on the publication, Lisanne!

Map of study locations, North America, 1970–2021. Colors designate study species: orange is caribou (Rangifer tarandus), blue is elk (Cervus canadensis), green is moose (Alces alces), red is mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and purple is white-tailed deer (O. virginianus). Juvenile and adult age classes are represented with green and blue circles, respectively

🆕 & #OpenAccess in "Ecology": A meta study of 1,000+ ungulate tracking studies shows how the number of predator species shapes patterns of predation

📄Interspecific carnivore competition and ungulate predation correlate with predator species richness
doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey? The human shield hypothesis posits that predators avoid areas of human disturbance due to perceived risk from humans, and prey therefore seeks refuge in these areas of perceived safety. Our systemati....

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Gray Wolf Research Group | wolf research conservation and management The Gray Wolf Research Group conducts research on wild wolves to better understand their ecology and help inform wolf management and conservation. The group is headed by Dr. David Ausband, USGS scient...

More on the research group and its various current and past projects here: www.graywolfresearch.org