Our research focuses on developing and applying quantitative methods to address questions in conservation biology and environmental risk assessment.

We are currently interested in methods and approaches for predicting the vulnerability of species to global climate change, human land-use, toxicity and other threats. For more information see Research.

If you are interested in joining the Akcakaya lab as a graduate student, please read Information for Prospective Students.

Highlighted papers

A recent paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B linked spatially-explicit climate change predictions to a dynamic metapopulation model to compare the dynamics of range margins for two lagomorph species under climate change. Read the paper online.

A recent paper in a special issue of Biology Letters on climate change used a novel approach linking bioclimate models and metapopulation models to demonstrate that complex interactions between life history, disturbance regime and distribution pattern mediate species extinction risks under climate change. Read the paper online.

A recent paper in Conservation Biology presents the structure and function of the IUCN Red List system, outlines its philosophical and technical background, and clarifies some of its widely misunderstood aspects. Read more    

An earlier paper in Conservation Biology demonstrated that scalar models (with no age or stage structure within populations) often overestimate the risk of decline. Such simple models are often used in cases where the only available data are a time series of population size estimates (these methods are also known as "count-based models" and "diffusion approximation"). Read more    

An article in Global Change Biology focused on the use and misuse of the IUCN Red List Criteria in projecting climate change impacts on biodiversity. Read more

Recent Presentations

At the annual meeting of Society for Conservation Biology in July 2008:

• Resit Akçakaya gave a talk on "Predicting extinction risks under climate change: integrating stochastic metapopulation models with dynamic bioclimatic habitat models."
• Jessica Stanton gave a talk on "Linking changing habitat to PVA models: effects of spatial pattern of landscape change on viability, stability, and functionality of 3 avian species."