Mitchell Eaton is a Research Ecologist with the USGS Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and an adjunct faculty member in Applied Ecology at NC State University. His research focuses on wildlife ecology & management, emphasizing quantitative modeling to understand resource dynamics and use of decision-theoretic methods to guide management decisions under uncertainty.
Mitch earned a M.S. in Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota (2002; use of harvest data to assess sustainability of tropical vertebrates) and his Ph.D in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado (2009; population demographics, genetics and harvest management of African crocodiles). An interest in how policy makers actually use science to make decisions led him to a postdoc at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (USGS), where he worked with some of the top researchers in the field of decision theory to develop and apply quantitative decision-analytic tools for addressing resource management issues in the U.S. and globally. Mitch currently integrates his background and interests in population ecology with decision science to help managers and decision makers frame management problems, formulate approaches to predict outcomes and evaluate trade-offs, test hypotheses and improve decision making via adaptive management, and optimally allocate resources under uncertainty. Mitch is interested in bridging the science-management gap by working with decision makers early in their formulation of management issues and considering how science can most effectively support decision-making. He also has an ongoing interest in tropical ecology, crocodilian conservation and wildlife harvest dynamics.
Additional Projects:
Development of an adaptive management plan to restore the Herring River estuary, Cape Cod
National Wildlife Refuges provide habitat for important fish and wildlife species and services that benefit coastal communities, like storm-surge protection. USGS scientists are helping coastal refuges plan for and adapt to sea-level rise.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources need to develop a plan of action to help the recovery of two endangered species in the genus Eleutherodactylus (commonly known as “coqui”), while also reducing the risk that 14 other coqui species would be added to the Endangered Species list. Prior work by these researchers has identified...
Climate change doesn’t just threaten our natural resources—it threatens our cultural resources, too. Cultural resources represent evidence of past human activity, such as archeological sites, or are of significance to a group of people traditionally associated with the resource, such as Native American ceremonial sites. Climate change is challenging the long-term persistence of many cultural...
Coastal National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) provide a myriad of beneficial services, including buffering storm surge, improving water quality, supporting commercial fisheries, and providing habitat for imperiled wildlife and plants. Yet in the last century, coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by human development activities as well as sea-level rise and more frequent...
This final report summarizes activities, outcomes, and lessons learned from a 3-year project titled “Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges” with the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and local partners in the surrounding South Carolina Lowcountry. The Lowcountry is classified as the 10-county area encompassing...
Eaton, Mitchell J.; Johnson, Fred A.; Mikels-Carrasco, Jessica; Case, David J.; Martin, Julien; Stith, Bradley; Yurek, Simeon; Udell, Bradley; Villegas, Laura; Taylor, Laura; Haider, Zulquarnain; Charkhgard, Hadi; Kwon, Changhyun
Quantifying the contribution of habitat dynamics relative to intrinsic population processes in regulating species persistence remains an ongoing challenge in ecological and applied conservation. Understanding these drivers and their relationship is essential for managing habitat‐dependent species, especially those that specialize in transitional...
Eaton, Mitchell; Breininger, David; Nichols, James D.; Fackler, Paul; McGee, Samantha; Smurl, Michelle; DeMeyer, David; Baker, Jonny; Zondervan, Maria B. Self-organization is a process of establishing and reinforcing local structures through feedbacks between internal population dynamics and external factors. In reef-building systems, substrate is collectively engineered by individuals that also occupy it and compete for space. Reefs are constrained spatially by the physical environment, and by...
Yurek, Simeon; Eaton, Mitchell; Lavaud, Romain; Laney, R. Wilson; DeAngelis, Don; Pine, William E.; LaPeyre, Megan K.; Martin, Julien; Frederick, Peter C; Wang, Hongqing; Lowe, Michael R.; Johnson, Fred; Camp, Edward V.; Mordecai, Rua Community occupancy models estimate species‐specific parameters while sharing information across species by treating parameters as sampled from a common distribution. When communities consist of discrete groups, shrinkage of estimates towards the community mean can mask differences among groups. Infinite mixture models using a Dirichlet process (...
Sollmann, Rahel; Eaton, Mitchell; Link, William; Mulundo, Paul; Ayebare, Samuel; Prinsloo, Sarah; Plumptre, Andrew J.; Johnson, D.S. Coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by human development, and climate change and other stressors are now further degrading the capacity of those ecological and social systems to remain resilient in the face of such disturbances. We sought to identify potential ways in which local conservation interests in the...
Johnson, Fred A.; Eaton, Mitchell J.; Mikels-Carrasco, Jessica; Case, David J. Background Among the most widely anticipated climate-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution in response to changing climate conditions. In particular, a series of commonly articulated hypotheses have emerged: species are expected to shift their distributions to higher...
Rubenstein, Madeleine A.; Weiskopf, Sarah R.; Carter, Shawn; Eaton, Mitchell; Johnson, Ciara; Lynch, Abigail; Miller, Brian W.; Morelli, Toni Lyn; Rodriguez, Mari Angel; Terando, Adam; Thompson, Laura No abstract available.
Carlson, Andrew K.; Taylor, William W.; Cronin, Melissa R; Eaton, Mitchell; Eckert, Lauren E.; Kaemingk, Mark A; Reid, Andrea J.; Trudeau, Ashley
The collective set of decisions involved with the restoration of degraded wetlands is often more complex than considering only ecological responses and outcomes. Restoration is commonly driven by a complex interaction of social, economic, and ecological factors representing the mandate of resource stewards and the values of stakeholders. The...
Smith, David R.; Eaton, Mitchell J.; Gannon, Jill J.; Smith, Timothy P.; Derleth, Eric L.; Katz, Jonathan; Bosma, Kirk F.; Leduc, Elise In recent years, researchers from interdisciplinary teams involving ecologists, economists and operations re- searchers collaborated to provide decision support tools to address the challenges of preserving biodiversity by optimizing the design of reserves. The goal of this paper is to further advance this area of research and provide new...
Sierra-Altamiranda, Alvaro; Charkhgard, Hadi; Eaton, Mitchell J.; Martin, Julien; Yurek, Simeon; Udell, Bradley J. National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) along the East Coast of the United States protect habitat for a host of wildlife species, while also offering storm surge protection, improving water quality, supporting nurseries for commercially important fish and shellfish, and providing recreation opportunities for coastal communities. Yet in the last century,...
Eaton, Mitchell; Costanza, Jennifer K.; Johnson, Fred A; Martin, Julien; Taylor, Laura Climate change and urban growth impact habitats, species, and ecosystem services. To buffer against global change, an established adaptation strategy is designing protected areas to increase representation and complementarity of biodiversity features. Uncertainty regarding the scale and magnitude of landscape change complicates reserve planning...
Eaton, Mitchell J.; Yurek, Simeon; Haider, Zulqarnain; Martin, Julien; Johnson, Fred; Udell, Bradley; Charkhgard, Hadi; Kwon, Changhyun Designing effective long-term monitoring strategies is essential for managing wildlife populations. Implementing a cost-effective, practical monitoring program is especially challenging for widespread but locally rare species. Early successional habitat preferred by the New England cottontail (NEC) has become increasingly rare and fragmented,...
Shea, Colin P.; Eaton, Mitchell; MacKenzie, Darryl I.
Livingston Ledger has published an article about a study from Southeast CASC-supported researchers at North Carolina State University that found significant knowledge gaps in how to protect culturally significant sites from climate change. Researchers are now working with managers to identify possible solutions to these gaps.