Sarah Carter, PhD

Sarah Carter is a Supervisory Research Ecologist at the Fort Collins Science Center. Her interests lie in landscape, wildlife, and community ecology. Sarah is interested in how we can best manage landscapes to accommodate diverse resource uses and values, informed by monitoring the health of landscapes, the effectiveness of planning and management actions, and the effects of changing land uses and conditions on species, ecosystems, and landscapes. A focus in all of Sarah’s research is finding ways to bridge the gap between research and resource management. Sarah works with resource managers in all of her work, with a goal of producing applied science products that are relevant, useful, and used by resource planners, managers, and policy makers.

Sarah joined the USGS in 2015. She and her research team are currently working on a number of projects to help inform management of multiple-use lands in the western US, including identifying the types and topics of science that are most needed by public land managers and developing new approaches for synthesizing science that are tailored to the needs and decision processes of federal land managers. These syntheses provide core science, data, methods, and mitigation measures relevant to decision-making about topics ranging from energy development to transportation, recreation, livestock grazing, wildfire, and drought. Sarah’s research program also focuses on developing practical coproduction tools, developing science strategies for federal conservation lands, developing and fostering greater use of habitat models for rare and invasive species to inform federal decision-making, and identifying indicators, methods, and datasets for quantifying the health, integrity, and intactness of western landscapes.