School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

With its unique position spanning marine and freshwater environments, the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Science (SAFS) attracts researchers, scientists, scholars and students from a wide sea of disciplines.

The first in a new series of SAFS Spotlight, we spoke with Sarah Converse, Associate Professor at SAFS and Unit Leader of the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. With her research group focused on the development of methods for understanding and managing populations, she gave us insight into why quantitative population ecology and decision science is so important.

How did you get into your research field?

My journey began as a PhD student analyzing demographic data at Colorado State University and I loved it. I was fascinated with how populations work, and it was definitely a light bulb moment for me.

How did you end up at SAFS?

I spent my early career, post-PhD, at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland. But I always had my eye on a position in the Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units program, which is a federal program that places USGS scientists in universities to provide a bridge between state and federal management agencies and universities. In particular, I was always very interested in the Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (WACFWRU), which is housed in SAFS, because I knew that I loved the Pacific Northwest.

As Unit Leader, I work closely with Mark Scheuerell (Assistant Unit Leader – Fish) and Alex McInturff (Assistant Unit Leader – Wildlife) to carry out the mission of the WACFWRU. Mark and I are on the faculty in SAFS and Alex is on the faculty in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), but we all work closely with state agencies in Washington and federal agencies in the Pacific Northwest and beyond to help them fill their applied research needs.

My personal research program hits on a couple of areas. One is broadly population ecology and assessment – how do fish and wildlife populations work and how are they doing? Are they headed into trouble or are they recovering? I work primarily on threatened populations across a wide array of species, from fish to marine and terrestrial birds to marine and terrestrial mammals. I even work on some invertebrates here and there.

Another area that really interests me is working closely with managers to figure out how to use what we learn about populations to help manage them. I am interested in using the best science regarding how people can make challenging decisions most effectively, and I work with managers to apply this body of knowledge. Managers regularly have to make tough decisions involving uncertainty, risk, and challenging tradeoffs between objectives. I like to help them to think through those decisions so that they can do their best to manage threatened species.

Some good news from a species conservation perspective here in Washington is the recolonization of wolves. I’m part of a team that has been working closely with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to understand where the wolf population in Washington is heading. Wolves can be a controversial species in Washington, but we have tried to simply tell the story of what is happening with this population, because it really is a fascinating story. Wolves disappeared from Washington in the 1930s, and they were gone for nearly 90 years. But now, the population is growing every year, and our results suggest that wolves are on track to meet the State’s recovery criteria.

How does work involving wolves fit into SAFS?

While we’re housed in SAFS, we are the Washington Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. So, we want to help agencies that are managing both terrestrial and aquatic species.

And honestly, what I’ve learned is that populations are populations. You can have expertise in particular areas and species, but if you study populations, a lot of the methods are quite similar, so we can use them across a range of species. It’s also more interesting and rewarding for me to study a wide variety of species.

What has been an interesting discovery for you during your work?

I worked for a long time on Whooping Cranes, which is one of the most endangered birds in North America. I worked on science to support reintroduction efforts for this species. In doing that work, I got very interested in how we could reestablish migratory behavior in this species, considering that Whooping Crane chicks learn to migrate from their parents. We essentially had to recreate the culture of migration in this population, where we define culture as knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation based on learning rather than genetics.

In birds like the Whooping Crane, where migration is largely learned, we can really see the important role that individual and social learning play. For a long time in our history, wildlife biologists tended to see species almost as automatons that just reacted to stimuli in their environment. In reality, many animals are much more complex and interesting than that.

What are three pieces of advice you’d give to someone looking to join your field?

One is very practical. Take a good amount of math, as it’s extremely helpful in ecology, which is an increasingly quantitative field.

Secondly, get research experience and get your hands on data. Understand how to work with it.

Thirdly, our science is only as good as our hypotheses and I would encourage people to read widely, think critically, and think as scientists driven by scientific method. We observe, we hypothesize, we predict, we test our predictions, and we make inference from results of those tests. The quality of that inference is largely driven by the quality of the thinking we do beforehand.

Why is modeling research important in global themes around conservation and resource management?

I’m a conservation biologist and in general, a lot of my focus is on declining populations. We’re in a major extinction episode on the planet.

What interests me is how do we make decisions given the global situation we’re in? Most of my work is ultimately focused on identifying the smartest thing we can do with the limited resources we have.

But although we’re in a period of mass extinction, there are positive stories out there regarding conservation driven through research.

I’ve spoken about the wolves, but there are also successful examples of islands around the world that are recovering after the removal of invasive populations. I work on islands that have had invasive species eradicated, and it is amazing to see species come back to these islands. It’s a positive thing to be able to share, where we’ve had the tools to apply to a real-world conservation effort and make it work, and completely change an ecosystem by removing an invasive predator. 

What do you think are the major developments that will happen in this field in next 5-10 years?

When it comes to studying populations, we are much better now at doing more with less. We’re better at data integration and figuring out the smartest way to put it all together and make the most out of data. Our data streams are also better, for example, we put little loggers on seabirds in the Salish Sea this summer and received high quality location data every 5 minutes. The combination of analytical and monitoring methods is opening up a ton of possibilities.

We’re also a lot more sophisticated in the ways we think. Ecologists had a history of being primarily interested in how things work when people aren’t involved. Now we’re asking questions like how do the systems work recognizing people’s integral role? This is very important from a management standpoint.

And this is where the expertise of my colleague Alex McInturff is so important. Alex is trained as both an ecologist and a social scientist, and he’s especially interested in how species and ecological systems interact, and how this influences decisions and outcomes.

You’ve travelled and been involved in research around the world. What is your favorite project location and why?

I love Washington. I took this job because I loved the idea of working right where I live. For 10 years, I worked where the nearest project to me was 1,500 miles away. Now I can get into a car and go and study seabirds in Puget Sound. I love working locally and so I immerse myself with issues in Washington. It also helps to reduce my carbon footprint!