Bob Crabtree Email and Phone Number

Robert (Bob or Rob) is a systems ecologist who has dedicated the last 34 years to understanding the living systems of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Learning from large-scale natural and policy experiments over time, he is developing an Ecological Forecasting program to drive adaptive decision-making to sustain healthy ecosystems. A field ecologist at heart, he was first fascinated with bird communities and the process of predation since a teenager. He first worked on a great-horned owl study as a high school student and published his first paper as an undergraduate at the University of Idaho on competition between two species of flycatchers. After two positions working for state fish and game agencies, he studied skunk, weasel, and fox predation on waterfowl nests at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Utah. He then worked for Battelle PNL (PhD) and led the first study of an unexploited coyote population at the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve in Washington. After a post-doc at UC-Berkeley on animal movement modeling, he was awarded two grants in Yellowstone National Park to (1) build a social-structured population model for Yellowstone wolves as part of the EIS process, and (2) initiate the 20-year Canid Ecology Project (CEP). In 1993, he then founded the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center based on: (1) long-term research and monitoring, (2) conservation science from genes to large-ecosystem spatial scales, and (3) collaborative partnerships with stakeholders. He also started a career track as a landscape ecologist to use remote sensing fusion and data assimilation modeling to understand the cause and consequence of populations responding to habitat and climate change over large landscapes. He continues to strive to translate the results of ecological research and monitoring into informed decision-making and on-the-ground conservation action. Bob continues to mentor field interns, employees, graduate students and post-docs at YERC's Geospatial Dynamics lab in Bozeman, Montana.