Research Overview
While at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, I worked on a project investigating the managed forest landscapes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Variation in tree regeneration and declines in habitat for songbirds of conservation concern have been observed across the forest. We continue to develop an integrated ecological-economic simulation model, combining the USFS Forest Vegetation Simulator with sub-models developed from analyses of our own data, to investigate these issues.

So far we have:

1. quantified the effects of local and regional landscape characteristics on the spatial distribution of white-tailed deer (Millington et al. 2010),
2. assessed the factors contributing to poor sugar maple regeneration across multiple spatial scales (Matonis et al. 2011), and
3. modelled the long-term effects of variation in tree regeneration and timber harvest practices on forest songbirds and timber production (Millington et al. 2011).

We are still working on evaluating the performance of the ecological sub-model and linking them with economic models to investigate management trade-offs.

You can read more about this project on my blog.