Established in 2024, the Wildlife Decision-Support Shop is a new wildlife research laboratory in the Nevada Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Nevada, Reno. We build science products to support decision needs for wildlife management agencies in the Great Basin region and beyond.
Our overall goal is to provide science that helps understand how landscapes influence wildlife populations and communities and supports value-based wildlife management decisions in an inclusive and transparent framework. We have capacity in quantitative ecology and population biology that is not unusual among wildlife research laboratories – but we hope our additional interests in decision analysis and co-production are core values that set us apart. To this end, we work closely with cooperating agencies to understand their decision problems and build them highly customized science products that support their real-world management decisions.
Another core mission of the Shop is to train the next generation of wildlife managers, decision makers, and scientists. We employ and train graduate students (MS or PhD) and post-docs on fully-funded projects investigating important issues for wildlife biology and management in the Great Basin region. Students can participate in degree-granting programs through the Natural Resource and Environmental Sciences (NRES) Program or the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (EECB) Program at UNR.
On this site, you can learn about who we are, our research interests, publications and tools from our work, our lab lead’s philosophy toward mentorship, and expectations for behavior in the lab. We will post advertisements for graduate student and scientist opportunities here as well.
Please reach out if you are interested in joining our team or collaborating with us!
Contact information:
Dr. Brian Folt
(he/him)
Assistant Unit Leader - Wildlife
U.S. Geological
Survey, Nevada Cooperative Fish
and Wildlife Research Unit
University of Nevada, Reno
Office: 100A Knudtsen Resource Center, 1000 Valley Road, Reno, NV
89512
Mail: 1664 N. Virginia Street, Mail Stop 405, Reno, NV
89557
Email: bfolt@unr.edu