Christopher A Custer, Ph.D.
I am a quantitative ecologist primarily interested in aquatic ecosystems. I am drawn to applied questions with meaningful conservation and management implications.
I joined the USGS Virginia-West Virginia Water Science Center as a hydrologist in 2025. Prior to that, my research focused on the development and application of statistical models that predicted the abundance and distribution of fishes across large spatial extents. As a postdoctoral research scholar at NC State University, I worked with a team to estimate the absolute abundance of red snapper, a socioeconomically important reef fish, across the southeastern U.S. Atlantic. My doctoral research centered on various species distribution modeling efforts, such as quantifying the relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors in landscape-based models of stream fish distributions and the development of a joint species, spatially dependent physiologically guided abundance model.