the wildlifers
Our Services
We specialize in a wide variety of services in the wildlife and natural resource education and research fields.
Wildlife Monitoring & Assessment
Statistical Analysis
Habitat Assessment & Restoration
Data Collection & Analysis
Data collection is the systematic process of gathering and analyzing information to answer relevant questions, test hypotheses, evaluate outcomes, and make predictions about future probabilities and trends. The Wildlifers specialize in quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis to help your agency or organization formulate credible answers, solve problems, and make informed decisions, as well as establish baselines, benchmarks, and goals. We ensure accurate, reliable, valid, and repeatable data collection methods.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
The Wildlifers design, manage, and produce GIS databases and maps. We conduct complex tabular and spatial geographic analyses and remote sensing, plus other related activities such as geocoding and animal geotracking. Every effort is made to convey extremely complex data in a clear and simple manner with GIS, as well as following the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) geographic metadata standards for metadata creation, management, and maintenance.
Literature Searches & Reviews
We conduct literature searches and reviews to help people learn new and more effective ways of examining, evaluating, and understanding scientific information—and to expand upon their collective knowledge base. We serve both authors and consumers of scientific literature. We can customize any bibliographic research to meet your needs from compiling a list of bibliographic resources to conducting an in-depth critical review capable of meeting the highest standards of peer-review.
Critical Reviews
Habitat Inventory & Assessment
When several populations of interacting plants and animals inhabit a given place they form a community. A community of organisms interacting with the chemical and physical factors of their environment make up an ecosystem. The earth is comprised of a remarkable variety of aquatic ecosystems—rivers, lakes, wetlands, estuaries, and oceans, as well as terrestrial ecosystems—forests, grasslands, tundra, and deserts.
Ecosystems and their biological communities are constantly changing and adapting in response to changes in environmental conditions. Natural changes such as drought, fire, floods, volcanic eruptions, and human-caused changes such as deforestation, urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture affect wildlife habitat. Some changes are gradual—climate change, overharvesting, and excessive tourism. While other changes are sudden or catastrophic—mining, warfare, and earthquakes.
The ability of an organism, population, community, or ecosystem to resist change or recover rapidly from environmental disturbances or changes is remarkable. Nature is resilient provided changes to the environment are not too severe. For example, species with access to a variety of resources can compensate for the loss of a single resource by shifting to an alternative resource. However, species dependent on one resource, without having an available alternative, suffer whenever the resource is limited or significantly impacted. Many individuals within a population may fail to reproduce or survive. Essentially the distribution, structure, and abundance of any species is limited by the quantity and quality of available habitat in any given area.
Understanding the condition of each population and habitat requires careful observation and evaluation. Wildlife habitat evaluations describe, measure, and estimate site conditions such as the plant community, soil, geology, topography, weather, climate, history, and demography. Habitat data is obtained by a variety of methods such as literature reviews, vegetation sampling, and remote sensing.
Habitat evaluations help us to: (1) determine the value of a habitat for wildlife and humans; (2) identify natural and human-caused impacts degrading or destroying habitat; (3) detect population responses to environmental stress; (4) predict habitat conditions if an activity is allowed to continue or transpire; and (5) monitor the cumulative impacts of land use changes to a habitat over time.
The Wildlifers promote habitat diversity. We support all efforts based on sound scientific and commonsense practices—educational, managerial, research, and planning—that reduce or mitigate for land use activities that degrade or destroy wildlife habitat.