September Program and Meeting

Urban Coyotes and Foxes in Wichita: Reevaluation in science and society of the role of wild animals in urban settings, presented by Jon Beckman, PhD.

Join us for our first program of the season. Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks and Utah State University are interested in learning how red foxes and coyotes coexist with humans. They are conducting a study in Wichita to learn more about urban coyotes and red fox populations. They are using GPS collars, trail cameras, and citizen science to gather data. Jon will tell us about the project and what they have learned so far.

Jon Beckmann, PhD is a Wildlife Supervisor for the Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks (KDWP) and an Adjunct Faculty member with graduate faculty status at the University of Nevada-Reno and Utah State University. Jon completed his PhD at the University of Nevada (UNR) where he focused his dissertation work on comparing black bears at the wildland-urban interface to wildland bears. In his previous roles he served as the Director of Wildlife Science for the Rocky Mountain Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Connectivity Initiative Coordinator for the North America Program at WCS, where he was for 20 years. He currently sits as the KDWP representative on the WAFWA Wildlife Movement and Migration Working Group. He has been the Principal Investigator on several projects in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and in other regions of North America. Jon’s research and conservation projects have focused on the impacts of natural gas development and other anthropogenic factors on ungulate (pronghorn, moose, and elk) migrations in the Yellowstone ecosystem and northern Rockies. 

Jon also has a 25+ year study investigating impacts of urban environments on black bears and reducing human-bear conflicts along the wildland-urban interface in the Lake Tahoe Basin of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He has spent the past 25+ years examining connectivity for large carnivores in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and northern Rockies, examining wildlife connectivity for jaguars and other species (e.g. bears, cougars, and T&E nectarivorous bats) along the US-Mexico border and understanding how human-altered environments impact cougar ecology, behavior, and population dynamics in the Great Basin Desert. Along with >70 peer-reviewed journal publications and 9 book chapters, Jon is lead editor on an Island Press book titled Safe Passages: highways, wildlife and habitat connectivity. His work over the past 25 years has led to the return of black bears to the Great Basin Desert following an 80-year absence and the population now totals >700 bears.

The program will available on YouTube the next day