Machine Learning

In 2021, the Fort Collins Science Center initiated a research effort to estimate road age and annual traffic volumes across the majority of roads in Wyoming for assessing impacts to wildlife. Data on roads often focus on the ‘where’ (for example, spatial features) but neglect the ‘when’ (for example, road age) or ‘how much’ (for example, traffic volume). Knowing these characteristics is critical...

Roads and their associated infrastructure can cause substantial and pervasive effects on adjacent ecosystems but are necessary for the movement and redistribution of goods, people, wealth, and natural resources in modern societies. The Fort Collins Science Center has initiated research looking at how roads and traffic may be impacting sagebrush ecosystems and the wildlife inhabiting them. This...

North American bats face unprecedented threats including habitat loss and fragmentation, white-nose syndrome, wind energy development, and climate change. However, it is difficult to evaluate the impacts of these threats due to a lack of basic information about the distribution and abundance of bats across the continent. Although bat monitoring has long been conducted in individual areas and for...