William Andrew Cox
Research Interests
Broadly speaking, I am interested in anthropogenic influences on the demography of wildlife. For my dissertation, I investigated patterns of predator-specific nest predation across a gradient of forest fragmentation in the Midwestern United States to better understand why nest survival is so low in highly fragmented habitats. My work with Frank Thompson continued to focus on songbird demography. We have investigated the consequences of long-term declines in brood parasitism rates for Missouri songbirds and we finished a meta-analysis of the management implications of post-fledging survival for songbirds. Our work with the Northeast Climate Science Center focused on the proximate effects of weather on demography, where we detected a strong interaction between temperature and forest fragmentation on the productivity of two songbird species. We investigated the influence of temperature on predator-specific rates of nest predation. Much of our work emphasized the need to consider biotic interactions when assessing future impacts of climate on wildlife.
