My Story:
About Me
I have always been fascinated by the natural world. As a child, I would spend hours outside - swimming, running through the woods, climbing trees, building forts - the typical kid activities. These experiences led me to pursue a B.Sc. in Natural Resources at Northland College and a Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Vermont. I also worked as a fisheries technician for the USGS Lake Superior Biological Station and the Lake Erie Biological Station before beginning graduate school.
My choice of research topics is deeply personal and a lifetime in the making. Growing up in Wisconsin, I am no stranger to winter. However, not all winters were cold. In 2012, I remember jumping into the ice-free waters of Lake Superior in March - yes, I may be a little crazy. Two years later, a polar vortex produced record-high ice coverage on Lake Superior in March. Was this variability normal, or was change in the air? What effects might this variability have on fish and other aquatic organisms? How might shifting ecosystems influence fish conservation? These questions became the foundation of my career as a fish biologist. My research centers on addressing them through quantitative, modeling, and experimental approaches.
I was a Postdoctoral Associate with Mississippi State University and the Mississippi Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. My primary project was developing a web-based application to provide data integration and analytics tools for invasive carps throughout the Mississippi River Basin.
I am currently a fisheries biologist with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. My primary responsibility is managing fish communities within reservoirs across the northern region of Utah.
Personal Life
I am an avid outdoors enthusiast always looking for the next mountain to climb, or ski up (yes, up!) depending on the season with my wife, son, and dog. My free time is usually spent kayaking, alpine, backcountry, and nordic skiing, trail running, camping, biking, or fishing. During my less active time, you can usually find me sitting around a campfire, enjoying a craft beer, woodworking, gardening, or catching up on the latest R news.
Experience
Credit: Paul Vecsei
Reservoir Fish Management
As a reservoir fisheries biologist, I demonstrated comprehensive responsibility for designing, implementing, analyzing, and interpreting a multi-gear monitoring program supporting warm-, cool-, and cold-water fisheries, including multiple blue-ribbon fisheries. My management approach is grounded in applied decision-making, integrating biological data with stocking history, regulatory frameworks, and stakeholder considerations. Leveraging my quantitative background, I have applied advanced fisheries analyses to synthesize long-term datasets, communicate uncertainty, and anticipate trade-offs (e.g., harvest mortality versus growth dynamics), generating strategic management insights and structured decision-making pathways within complex reservoir systems. Additional responsibilities included developing and conducting research projects to address identified management needs, evaluating harvest regulations, enhancing fish habitat to improve population resilience during drought conditions, designing adaptive stocking strategies, and planning future modeling and creel survey efforts to balance angler satisfaction with long-term population sustainability.
KEY COLLABORATORS:
Christopher Penne
Clint Brunson
Primary Reservoirs Managed: Birch Creek, Causey, Cutler, East Canyon, Echo, Hyrum, Lost Creek, Mantua, Newton, Pineview, Porcupine, Rockport, Smith and Morehouse, Stateline, Whitney, Willard Bay, and Woodruff.
Spatial Ecology of Tiger Muskellunge
This project leveraged acoustic telemetry to quantify post-stocking survival, movement ecology, and habitat use of Tiger Muskellunge in Pineview Reservoir, Utah. A strategically designed receiver array and intracoelomic transmitter implantation in juvenile and adult fish generated high-resolution, multi-year detection data. By integrating survival estimates, seasonal movement networks, home range analyses, and mixed-effects modeling, the study moved beyond traditional snapshot sampling to establish a spatially explicit framework for evaluating recruitment bottlenecks and dispersal dynamics in a trophy esocid system. Findings informed adaptive stocking strategies (size-at-stocking, frequency, and timing), refined demographic estimates, and guided habitat enhancement under seasonal drawdowns and drought-driven habitat loss. The project demonstrated expertise in acoustic array design, surgical implantation, quantitative movement modeling, and applied fisheries management, exemplifying translational science that strengthened reservoir-scale decision-making.
KEY COLLABORATORS:
Christopher Penne
Clint Brunson
Muskies, Inc. Chapter 65 - Mountain West Muskie
Climate Adaptability of Freshwater Whitefishes
Freshwater whitefishes, Salmonidae Coregoninae (hereafter, coregonines), play important economic and ecological roles throughout the Northern Hemisphere; however, populations have declined over the past century. Coregonines generally spawn in late autumn, their embryos incubate over winter, and hatching occurs in early to late spring. Incubating coregonine embryos are sessile, leaving them vulnerable to predation and unable to evade adverse changes in winter environmental conditions. Through a series of laboratory experiments, we evaluated how climate-induced changes in aquatic ecosystems (i.e., water temperature and ice cover) may affect early-life development of coregonines across North America and Europe. We observed varying magnitudes of response among study groups, suggesting differential levels of developmental plasticity in response to climate change. We then developed temperature-dependent embryo development models to assess the potential impacts of projected increases in water temperature under three simulated future climate-warming scenarios. Our simulations demonstrated that relatively subtle changes in water temperature can translate into substantial shifts in coregonine reproductive phenology across study groups. In the absence of thermal adaptation, the phenological changes predicted by our models are likely to have negative implications for population sustainability throughout the twenty-first century, even under the lowest emissions scenario.
KEY COLLABORATORS:
Jason Stockwell
Mark Vinson
Emilien Lasne
Juha Karjalainen
Data Analytics Tools for Invasive Carps
The primary objective of this project was to develop a web-based application that provided data integration and analytics tools for invasive carps throughout the Mississippi River Basin. This work required maintaining a high level of communication with cooperating state, federal, and academic partners to address their specific data storage and analytical needs. Our goal was to enable cooperators to analyze standardized, interagency datasets, rapidly assess the distribution of invasive carps, and estimate key stock assessment metrics. Increasing access to rapid, regional-scale analyses of invasive carp data provided managers with additional capacity to conduct strategic planning, implement structured decision-making processes, and develop adaptive management programs. In addition, we pursued complementary side projects, including: (1) developing a simulation tool to estimate statistical power under varying future catch rates and sampling effort scenarios; (2) fitting gillnet selectivity models to quantify gear bias in invasive carp size structure analyses; and (3) developing a Bayesian belief network to support an adaptive decision-making framework for invasive carps in oxbow lakes within the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.
KEY COLLABORATORS:
Michael Colvin
Steve Miranda
Corey Dunn
Mark Rogers
