Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Ruth Oliver
Life Sciences; Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences
Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
UC Santa Barbara
Creating the Ecology of Death
We are living through the largest extinction event in human history and are struggling to reverse course because we lack a fundamental understanding of why species go extinct. Current approaches monitor changes in population abundances, but species go extinct through the deaths of individual animals. Despite its ubiquity, death is rarely observed directly. However, recent advances in tracking technology now provide massive volumes of data to observe animals’ deaths, and the events that precede them, at global scales. I propose to leverage the animal tracking revolution to study the causes and consequences of wildlife mortality. With the support of the UCOP Early Career Award, I will create a new field of study, the “Ecology of Death" to propel our understanding of the drivers of extinction.
