Gates Dupont

Profile

PhD student, Princeton University, EEB

MSc, UMass Amherst

MSc, UMass Amherst, 2021

BS, Cornell University, 2019

Dissertation/thesis title: Statistical improvements for ecological learning about spatial processes

Research Interests

My primary interests are in leveraging my quantitative skill set to bridge the gap between cutting-edge statistical models and unsolved ecological problems, both to test ecological theory and inform biological conservation. I'm particularly interested in questions aimed at understanding spatial structure in species and communities and how individual-level behaviors aggregate to produce population-level differences, all of which motivated me to explore spatial capture-recapture (“SCR”) methods in my Masters.

After graduating from Cornell, I became a founding developer of a range-wide camera-trapping database for jaguars (JAGSMAP) during my fellowship at the San Diego Zoo. Early in my Masters work, I received a grant from Panthera, the big cat research NGO, to develop a framework for generating optimal sampling designs for SCR (our paper on the subject was just accepted in Ecology). In my current Masters work, I am developing a telemetry-informed SCR model that is one of only a few methods to explicitly estimate landscape resistance to movement.

Publications

Dupont, G., J.A. Royle, M.A. Nawaz, C. Sutherland. (2020). Optimal sampling design for spatial capture-recapture. Ecology10.1002/ecy.3262