Brady J. Mattsson

Brady J. Mattsson
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management

PhD
I develop and test modeling approaches to answer questions in ecology and to inform sustainable management of wildlife.

About

69
Publications
18,877
Reads
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1,348
Citations
Introduction
Currently I am conducting research and teaching courses in wildlife conservation and management at the University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria. My main research interests are 1) population modeling of highly mobile species, and 2) applied decision analysis and adaptive management in the fields of wildlife and ecosystem conservation.
Additional affiliations
November 2017 - present
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna
Position
  • Instructor
February 2015 - November 2017
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna
Position
  • PostDoc Position
March 2011 - May 2012
U.S. Geological Survey
Position
  • Research Ecologist

Publications

Publications (69)
Article
Full-text available
In wildlife management, differing perspectives among stakeholders generate conflicts about how to achieve disparate sustainability goals that include ecological, economic, and sociocultural dimensions. To mitigate such conflicts, decisions regarding wildlife management must be taken thoughtfully. To our knowledge, there exists no integrative modeli...
Preprint
Full-text available
Counting the number of young in a brood from a distance is common practice, for example in tree-nesting birds. These counts can, however, suffer from over and undercounting, which can lead to biased estimates of fecundity (average number of nestlings per brood). Statistical model development to account for observation bias has focused on false nega...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity conservation efforts have been criticized for generating inequitable socio‐economic outcomes. These equity challenges are largely analyzed as place‐based problems affecting local communities directly impacted by conservation programs. The conservation of migratory species extends this problem geographically since people in one place ma...
Article
Full-text available
Calls for urgent action to conserve biodiversity under global change are increasing, and conservation of migratory species in this context poses special challenges. In the last two decades the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) has provided a framework for several subsidiary instruments including action plans...
Article
Full-text available
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Preprint
Full-text available
Sweden has the world's highest density of moose (Alces alces). Moose is not only a valuable game species; it also causes forest damages and traffic accidents. To avoid moose browsing, foresters respond by planting spruce (Picea abies) to an extent that reshapes the forest landscape with impacts on both production and biodiversity. To address this p...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the likely future impacts of biological invasions is crucial yet highly challenging given the multiple relevant environmental, socio‐economic and societal contexts and drivers. In the absence of quantitative models, methods based on expert knowledge are the best option for assessing future invasion trajectories. Here, we present an ex...
Article
Full-text available
Coupled human and natural systems exhibit complex interactions (e.g. feedback-loops) that are often poorly understood. Decision-makers from regional (e.g., state or provincial) scale environmental stewardship programs to international policy makers are often faced with uncertainties about future climatic and sociopolitical conditions (henceforth, s...
Article
The consequences of environmental disturbance and management are difficult to quantify for spatially structured populations because changes in one location carry through to other areas due to species movement. We develop a metric, G, for measuring the contribution of a habitat or pathway to network-wide population growth rate in the face of environ...
Article
Full-text available
Land-use intensification on arable land is expanding and posing a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide. We develop methods to link funding for avian breeding habitat conservation and management at landscape scales to equilibrium abundance of a migratory species at the continental scale. We apply this novel approach to a harvested...
Article
ContextFunding for habitat-management programs to maintain population viability is critical for conservation of migratory species; however, such financial resources are limited and can vary greatly over time. The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America is an excellent system for examining spatiotemporal patterns of funding for waterfowl conse...
Article
Full-text available
The ability to classify habitats and movement pathways as sources or sinks is an important part of the decision making process for the conservation of spatially structured populations. Diverse approaches have been used to quantify the importance of habitats and pathways in a spatial network; however, these approaches have been limited by a lack of...
Article
Full-text available
Conservation decision-making in transboundary regions presents considerable challenges for protected area managers working in countries with differing languages, laws, and cultures. Collaborative decision analysis has informed real-world conservation decisions in non-transboundary contexts. Here we evaluate for the first time its application in two...
Article
Using contingent valuation, we estimated willingness to pay (WTP) in Canada, Mexico, and the United States to protect habitat for Northern Pintails (hereafter pintails), a migratory waterfowl species that provides benefits to and requires habitat in the three countries. Our study contributes to research on spatial subsidies by measuring the value o...
Preprint
Published in Land Use Policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837718308913 Abstract: Conservation decision making in transboundary regions presents considerable challenges for protected area managers working in countries with differing languages, laws, and cultures. Collaborative decision analysis has informed real-world con...
Presentation
http://www.upr.org/post/undisciplined-psychophysiologist-and-conservation-biologist
Article
Full-text available
Purpose of Review Theoretical frameworks for adaptive natural resource management are quite common, whereas documented examples showing successful implementation of adaptive management and learning through multiple time intervals have remained uncommon. Measures of quality of adaptive natural resource management processes are needed to examine pote...
Article
Full-text available
Many economic studies value birdwatching in general and often do not account for potential differences in viewers’ benefits from observing different species. But, how different are economic values of viewing various bird species? To answer that question, we surveyed Ducks Unlimited (DU) members using an online questionnaire to estimate trip expendi...
Conference Paper
Integrating natural resource management (NRM) across international borders has been recognized as necessary to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services in the face of broad-scale pressures including growing resource demands, invasive species, natural hazards, and climate change. Implementing transboundary NRM strategies raises three prominent c...
Article
Full-text available
Migratory species provide important benefits to society, but their cross-border conservation poses serious challenges. By quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services (ESs) provided across a species’ range and ecological data on a species’ habitat dependence, we estimate spatial subsidies—how different regions support ESs provided by a spec...
Article
Full-text available
Protected areas (PAs) can generate many benefits inside and outside their borders, and achieving objectives for diverse stakeholders raises many challenges. There are many examples of successful PA management around the globe, although a systematic and comprehensive approach to developing and sharing these solutions has been lacking. We present “so...
Article
Many metrics exist for quantifying the relative value of habitats and pathways used by highly mobile species. Properly selecting and applying such metrics requires substantial background in mathematics and understanding the relevant management arena. To address this multidimensional challenge, we demonstrate and compare three measurements of habita...
Article
Full-text available
Migratory species provide ecosystem goods and services throughout their annual cycles, often over long distances. Designing effective conservation solutions for migratory species requires knowledge of both species ecology and the socioeconomic context of their migrations. We present a framework built around the concept that migratory species act as...
Article
Quantification of the economic value provided by migratory species can aid in targeting management efforts and funding to locations yielding the greatest benefits to society and species conservation. Here we illustrate a key step in this process by estimating hunting and birding values of the northern pintail (Anas acuta) within primary breeding an...
Article
Full-text available
Variation in movement across time and space fundamentally shapes the abundance and distribution of populations. Although a variety of approaches model structured population dynamics, they are limited to specific types of spatially structured populations and lack a unifying framework. Here, we propose a unified network-based framework sufficiently n...
Article
Growing resource demands by humans, invasive species, natural hazards, and a changing climate are creating broad-scale impacts and have created the need for broader-extent conservation activities that span ownerships and even political borders. Implementing regional-scale conservation brings great challenges, and learning how to overcome these chal...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding and conserving migratory species requires a method for characterizing the seasonal flow of animals among habitats. Source‐sink theory describes the metapopulation dynamics of species by classifying habitats as population sources (i.e. net contributors) or sinks (i.e. net substractors). Migratory species may have non‐breeding habitats...
Article
In July 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service announced a new policy interpretation for the Endangered Species Act. According to the Act, a species must be listed as threatened or endangered if it is determined to be threatened or endangered in a significant portion of its range. The 1973 law does not define...
Article
Full-text available
Every year, migratory species undertake seasonal movements along different pathways between discrete regions and habitats. The ability to assess the relative demographic contributions of these different habitats and pathways to the species’ overall population dynamics is critical for understanding the ecology of migratory species, and also has prac...
Technical Report
Full-text available
‘Knowledge synthesis’ refers to a set of methods used to review, collate and communicate the best available knowledge on a specific topic or question, including explicit scientific knowledge, but also indigenous and local knowledge, or tacit technical or opinion-based knowledge held by stakeholders. The process of knowledge synthesis is a crucial e...
Article
Coastal ecosystem management typically relies on subjective interpretation of scientific understanding, with limited methods for explicitly incorporating process knowledge into decisions that must meet multiple, potentially competing stakeholder objectives. Conversely, the scientific community lacks methods for identifying which advancements in sys...
Article
Full-text available
Decision makers that are responsible for stewardship of natural resources face many challenges, which are complicated by uncertainty about impacts from climate change, expanding human development, and intensifying land uses. A systematic process for evaluating the social and ecological risks, trade-offs, and cobenefits associated with future change...
Article
Full-text available
Migratory species provide economically beneficial ecosystem services to people throughout their range, yet often, information is lacking about the magnitude and spatial distribution of these benefits at regional scales. We conducted a case study for Northern Pintails (hereafter pintail) in which we quantified regional and sub-regional economic valu...
Article
Integration of conservation partnerships across geographic, biological, and administrative boundaries is increasingly relevant because drivers of change, such as climate shifts, transcend these boundaries. We explored successes and challenges of established conservation programs that span multiple watersheds and consider both social and ecological...
Article
Full-text available
In 2007, several important initiatives in the North American waterfowl management community called for an integrated approach to habitat and harvest management. The essence of the call for integration is that harvest and habitat management affect the same resources, yet exist as separate endeavours with very different regulatory contexts. A common...
Article
The annual migration of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) has high cultural value and recent surveys indicate monarch populations are declining. Protecting migratory species is complex because they cross international borders and depend on multiple regions. Understanding how much, and where, humans place value on migratory species can facilita...
Article
Full-text available
Coffee agroforestry systems and secondary forests have been shown to support similar bird communities but comparing these habitat types are challenged by potential biases due to differences in detectability between habitats. Furthermore, seasonal dynamics may influence bird communities differently in different habitat types and therefore seasonal e...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding interactions between mobile species distributions and landcover characteristics remains an outstanding challenge in ecology. Multiple factors could explain species distributions including endogenous evolutionary traits leading to conspecific clustering and endogenous habitat features that support life history requirements. Birds are a...
Article
We developed and evaluated the performance of a metapopulation model enabling managers to examine, for the first time, the consequences of alternative management strategies involving habitat conditions and hunting on both harvest opportunity and carrying capacity (i.e., equilibrium population size in the absence of harvest) for migratory waterfowl...
Article
Fecundity is fundamental to the fitness, population dynamics, conservation, and management of birds. For all the efforts made to measure fecundity or its surrogates over the past century of avian research, it is still mismeasured, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Fundamentally, these problems arise because of partial observability of underlying p...
Article
Full-text available
We evaluated hypotheses that seek to explain breeding strategies of the Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla) that vary across a latitudinal gradient. On the basis of data from 418 nests of color-banded individuals in southwestern Pennsylvania and 700 km south in the Georgia Piedmont, we found that clutch size in replacement nests and probabil...
Article
1. Understanding the distribution and ecology of episodic or mobile species requires us to address multiple potential biases, including spatial clustering of survey locations, imperfect detectability and partial availability for detection. These challenges have been addressed individually by previous modelling approaches, but there is currently no...
Article
Los bosques de cabecera de cuenca tienen muchas funciones ecológicas y pueden ser particularmente sensibles a cambios en el clima y en el uso del suelo. Las aves ribereñas pueden servir como indicadoras de los cambios que ocurren en sus ecosistemas asociados. Poco conocidas, sin embargo, son las influencias combinadas del clima y del uso del suelo...
Article
Population dynamics of small songbirds are driven in part by fecundity and productivity (i.e., the number of young that fledge and survive the dependent stage, respectively, per adult female per year). Because of the challenges of obtaining empirical estimates for productivity or fecundity, some researchers predict fecundity using a three-factor mo...
Article
Las condiciones del micro-sitio, del parche y del paisaje pueden interactuar para influenciar la depredación de nidos. En el norte de Minnesota, las prácticas silviculturales y agrícolas pueden estar involucradas en el incremento reciente de los depredadores de nidos y en la disminución regional de varias aves canoras que nidifican en el suelo. Par...
Article
ABSTRACT Headwater forests serve many ecological functions and may be particularly responsive to changes in climate and land use. Riparian birds can serve as indicators of changes in their associated ecosystems. Little known, however, are combined influences of climate and land use on riparian birds and riparian ecosystems. We examined multiscale a...
Article
Full-text available
Six large-bodied, >= 120 g, woodpecker species are listed as near-threatened to critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The small population paradigm assumes that these populations are likely to become extinct without an increase in numbers, but the combined influences of initial population size and demog...
Article
Rivers may serve as reservoirs for enteric organisms. Very little is known about the boundaries of microbial communities in moving bodies of water so this study was undertaken to find the limits of distribution of some bacteria, focusing on enteric organisms. The presence of Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Enterococcus spp. and the antimicrobial res...
Article
The ideal distribution hypothesis states that territorial animals identify habitats with ideal habitat suitability and alter their settlement patterns accordingly. This hypothesis assumes no cost of migrating to a more profitable patch once the current one becomes less profitable. Another underlying assumption is that individuals only use current i...
Article
Population dynamics of small songbirds are driven in part by fecundity and productivity (i.e., the number of young that fledge and survive the dependent stage, respectively, per adult female per year). Because of the challenges of obtaining empirical estimates for productivity or fecundity, some researchers predict fecundity using a three-factor mo...
Article
1. Benthic stream animals, in particular macroinvertebrates, are good indicators of water quality, but sampling can be laborious to obtain accurate indices of biotic integrity. Thus, tools for bioassessment that include measurements other than macroinvertebrates would be valuable additions to volunteer monitoring protocols. 2. We evaluated the usef...
Article
The Louisiana Waterthrush (waterthrush; Seiurus motacilla) is a forest-dwelling, Nearctic-Neotropical migratory passerine that nests along streams. We attached radiotransmitters (0.6-0.8 g) to 12 nestling waterthrushes using snug, elastic loops. At three nests, adult waterthrushes were videotaped removing radio-tagged young from the nest. In additi...
Article
Microsite, patch, and landscape conditions may interact to influence nest predation. In northern Minnesota, silvicultural and agricultural practices may be involved in recent increases in nest predators and regional declines in several ground-nesting songbirds. To examine this problem, we evaluated 17 hierarchical models of predation on Ovenbird (S...
Article
Full-text available
Macroinvertebrates are commonly used as biological indicators of stream habitat and water quality. Chemical variables, such as dissolved oxygen (DO), spe- cific conductance (SC), and turbidity are used to measure stream water quality. Many aquatic macroinvertebrates are sensitive to changes in water chemistry, and streams with degraded water qualit...
Article
Full-text available
Louisiana Waterthrushes (waterthrushes; Seiurus motacilla) are infrequently studied Neotropical migratory songbirds that breed throughout much of the southeastern U.S, which is undergoing rapid urbanization. They may serve as effective indicators of stream biotic integrity because of their dependence on riparian systems for food and nesting. Furthe...
Article
Full-text available
Avian monitoring is a regular component of long-term programs that evaluate changes in ecological integrity following natural and anthropogenic disturbance. While bird species or guilds can serve as cost-effective indicators of such changes, accounting for imperfect detection of birds in avian monitoring programs remains a challenge. Indeed, few st...
Article
Full-text available
Computer printout. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Minnesota, 2001. Includes bibliographical references.

Questions

Question (1)
Question
I have added several research items to a project, and only a subset of them appear under Project Log. I see no tab for "Research items" under the project, which would be a nice way to filter these from project updates. In any case, it appears some of the research items are hidden from the Project Log.

Network

Cited By
    • Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ / German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig / Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
    • Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung
    • University Vienna, Austria
    • University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna
    • West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (WVDNR)