Bethany R Straw

Bethany is a supervisory biologist at the Fort Collins Science Center. She serves as the Assistant Coordinator of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) providing leadership and direction for NABat across international boundaries. NABat is a continental scale bat population monitoring program that assembles data and delivers information on the bat species the United States shares with Canada and Mexico. Through tremendous collaboration, NABat creates and economy of scale that reduces burden and expands capacity for hundreds of external partner organizations. Bethany works with a small, dedicated, multi-disciplinary team comprised of biologists, quantitative ecologists, statisticians, data scientists, outreach and user support staff, and software engineers that work collaboratively to provide the services, resources, digital infrastructure, and science that support the success of the broader NABat collective. Bethany works closely alongside federal partners and external end users to develop technical solutions that address complex problems relevant to decision workflows that cover or consider bats. This includes exploring relationships between populations and stressors like energy development -- seeking to improve understanding of the source and magnitude of impact and potential solutions to minimize risk.