Huang Ryan
﷯Research Interests ______________________________________________________________ Conservation My main motivation for pursuing science has been to gain a better understanding of how we can protect our natural resources and biodiversity for generations to come. I'm interested in how human changes to the landscape impact species persistence. Unlike many fields of science, conservation is ultimately dependent on society's involvement and participations and as conservationists, it is our job to understand the full consequences of how we interact with the environment. Metapopulations My current research interests center on evaluating how fragmenting mangrove habitat affects the extinction risk of endemic birds using metapopulation theory. Metapopulations are made up of smaller populations occupying patches of habitat that interact with each other through dispersal. In metapopulation theory, we assume that local populations may go extinct, but are rescued by immigration from nearby patches. This balancing of extinction and colonization is what allows a species as a whole to persist throughout time.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not... To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

 -Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold

Publications & Presentations _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Huang, R., S. L. Pimm, C. Giri. 2017. How do globally changing mangrove fragments impact extinction risk of endemic birds? Oral Presentation at the 2017 International Congress for Conservation Biology, Cartagena, Colombia Huang, R., O. L. Bass, and S. L. Pimm. 2017. Sooty tern (Onychoprion fuscatus) survival, oil spills, shrimp fisheries, and hurricanes. PeerJ 5:e3287 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3287 Huang, R., S. L. Pimm, and O. Bass. 2016. Sooty tern migrations and the hurricanes they encounter. Oral presentation at the World Seabird Conference, Cape Town, South Africa. Huang, R., S. L. Pimm, and O. Bass. 2014. Using animal tracking to investigate changes in sooty tern breeding. Oral presentation at the Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment, Raleigh, NC. Huang, R., and L. A. Wilson. 2013. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in amphibians of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Provinces in northern Georgia, USA. Herpetological Review. 44(1):95-98.