Mark Hebblewhite

Mark Hebblewhite is an Assistant Professor in the Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT, where his research interests broadly lie in understanding 1) how wildlife such as ungulates balance the costs of predation from carnivores like wolves with the benefits of foraging, and 2) how human activities influence this balance, and the ensuing conservation and management consequences to wildlife population dynamics. Mark’s research has been used for applied management issues in Banff and Jasper National Parks such as endangered caribou recovery, urban elk management, carnivore corridor restoration, and trophic effects of habitat fragmentation. In adjacent provincial lands my research has been applied for ungulate harvest management, developing salvage logging guidelines for ungulates, and managing wildlife-human conflicts. Previous work also provided a quantitative transboundary management framework for managing anthropogenic effects on ungulates and carnivores that migrate across jurisdictional boundaries. I am especially interested in the conservation of migratory ungulates. Mark presently leads a woodland caribou research project in west-central Alberta and east-central British Columbia focused on how human activities influence the recovery of the threatened caribou populations. His other research involves effects of global climate change on elk population dynamics, large scale synthesis of the effects of predation, climate and primary productivity on ungulate populations, growth of urban elk populations, recovery of threatened sierra Nevada Bighorn sheep. Mark obtained his PhD at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada, where his PhD research was awarded the Canon National Parks Science Scholarship for the Americas. Mark graduated from the University of Guelph in 1995 with a Bsc. (Honors) in Pure and Applied Ecology, and completed his Masters in Wildlife Biology in 2000 at the University of Montana, USA with Dr. Dan Pletscher, studying wolf and elk dynamics in the Bow Valley of Banff National Park. Mark was an NSERC post-doctoral fellow at UBC with Dr. Tony Sinclair. Some studies conducted by Mark that recently received much attention are:

Hebblewhite, M., Merrill, E. H. and McDermid, G. 2007. A mutli-scale test of the forage maturation hypothesis for a partially migratory montane elk population. Ecological Monographs, In Press.
Hebblewhite, M. and Merrill, E. H. 2007. Multiscale wolf predation risk for elk: does migration reduce risk? Oecologia 152: 377-387.
Hurford, A., Hebblewhite, M. and Lewis, M.A. 2006. A spatially explicit model for the Allee effect: why wolves recolonize so slowly in Greater Yellowstone. Theoretical Population Biology 70: 244-254
Hebblewhite, M., Merril, E.H. and McDonald, T.E. 2005. Spatial decomposition of predation risk using resource selection functions: an example in a wolf-elk predator-prey system. Oikos 111:101-111.
Hebblewhite, M., White, C. A., Nietvelt, C., McKenzie, J. M., Hurd, T. E., Fryxell, J. M., Bayley, S. and Paquet, P. C. 2005 Human activity mediates a trophic cascade caused by wolves. Ecology 86: 2135-2144.
Hebblewhite, M. 2005. Predation by wolves interacts with the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO) on a western North American elk population. Journal of Animal Ecology 74: 226-233.