Travis Gallo

George Mason University | GMU · Department of Environmental Science and Policy

For over a century there have been continual efforts to incorporate nature into urban planning. These efforts – known as urban reconciliation– aim to manage and create habitats that support biodiversity within cities. Given that species select habitat at different spatial scales, understanding the scale at which urban species respond to their envir...

Nature-based green infrastructure projects have become a common consideration in cities for the benefits they provide to humans. However, the co-benefits provided to wildlife are often assumed but not critically assessed. The value of green infrastructure for wildlife likely depends on the habitat requirements of a species and the spatial context o...

As cities expand to accommodate a growing human population, their impacts to natural ecosystems and the wildlife residing within them increase. Some animals that persist in urban environments demonstrate behaviors distinct from their non-urban counterparts. These potential behavioral changes are the subject of a growing body of research in the area...

Understanding how biodiversity responds to urbanization is challenging, due in part to the single‐city focus of most urban ecological research. Here, we delineate continent‐scale patterns in urban species assemblages by leveraging data from a multi‐city camera trap survey and quantify how differences in greenspace availability and average housing d...

Research on urban wildlife can help promote coexistence and guide future interactions between humans and wildlife in developed regions, but most such investigations are limited to short‐term, single‐species studies, typically conducted within a single city. This restricted focus prevents scientists from recognizing global patterns and first princip...

Importance Breast cancer mortality is complex and traditional approaches that seek to identify determinants of mortality assume that their effects on mortality are stationary across geographic space and scales. Objective To identify geographic variation in the associations of population demographics, environmental, lifestyle, and health care acces...

Human-driven environmental changes shape ecological communities from local to global scales. Within cities, landscape-scale patterns and processes and species characteristics generally drive local-scale wildlife diversity. However, cities differ in their structure, species pools, geographies and histories, calling into question the extent to which...

Mesopredators including coyotes ( Canis latrans ) and red foxes ( Vulpes vulpes ) often co-occur in urban environments, but how niche partitioning facilitates their coexistence remains unclear. Highly urbanized areas can be spatial refuges for smaller mesopredators (i.e., spatial human shield effect), however these species also may coexist through...

Free-roaming domestic cats (Felis catus) are known to pose threats to ecosystem health via transmission of zoonotic diseases and predation of native wildlife. Likewise, free-roaming cats are also susceptible to predation or disease transmission from native wildlife. Physical interactions are required for many of these risks to be manifested, necess...

Time is a fundamental component of ecological processes. How animal behavior changes over time has been explored through well-known ecological theories like niche partitioning and predator-prey dynamics. Yet, changes in animal behavior within the shorter 24-hour light-dark cycle have largely gone unstudied. Understanding if an animal can adjust the...

Time is a fundamental component of ecological processes. How animal behavior changes over time has been explored through well-known ecological theories like niche partitioning and predator-prey dynamics. Yet, changes in animal behavior within the shorter 24-hour light-dark cycle have largely gone unstudied. Understanding if an animal can adjust the...

As urbanization continues to expand across the globe, urban wildlife research is critical for urban planners and conservation practitioners to create livable cities for both humans and wildlife. In 2012, Magle et al. conducted a foundational review on the status of urban wildlife research. The authors described the status of urban wildlife research...

In 1898, Herbert and Alice Walter started a 5-year survey of birds in Lincoln Park-the largest park in Chicago, Illinois-and summarized their data in an urban birding field guide, Wild Birds in City Parks. Twenty-nine years later, William Dreuth compared the relative frequency of species in the Walters' study to that in his own 5-year Lincoln Park...

Urban biodiversity provides critical ecosystem services and is a key component to environmentally and socially sustainable cities. However, biodiversity varies greatly within and among cities, leading to human communities with changing and unequal experiences with nature. The "luxury effect," a hypothesis that predicts a positive correlation betwee...

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are becoming increasingly common in urban environments. How they respond to potential changes (i.e. increased human interactions, traffic, overabundance) can influence herd health. We aimed to develop a technique that quantifies stress in deer using hair cortisol concentrations (HCC). Our objectives were t...

Urbanization is considered the fastest growing form of global land‐use change and can dramatically modify habitat structure and ecosystem functioning. While ecological processes continue to operate within cities, urban ecosystems are profoundly different from their more natural counterparts. Thus, ecological predictions derived from more natural ec...

Careful design of the green spaces in cities will benefit both wild animals and humans.

Aim Ecological restoration is critical for recovering biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet designing interventions to achieve particular outcomes remains fraught with challenges. In the extensive regions where non‐native species are firmly established, it is unlikely that historical conditions can be fully reinstated. To what degree, and how ra...

As urban growth expands and natural environments fragment, it is essential to understand the ecological roles fulfilled by urban green spaces. To evaluate how urban green spaces function as wildlife habitat, we estimated mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in city parks, cemeteries, golf courses, and natural areas throughout the greater Chi...

Using habitat mitigation to minimize or offset negative impacts of land use change on biodiversity is increasingly common and widespread. For example, where natural disturbance is undesirable (e.g., wildfire in oil and gas fields), mechanical approaches are frequently used to replace natural disturbance and improve habitat for particular species. H...

Keynote and plenary speakers at professional conferences serve as highly visible role models for early-career scientists and provide recognition of scientific excellence. This recognition may be particularly important for women, who are underrepresented in senior positions in the biological sciences. To evaluate whether conferences fulfill this pot...

Large-scale land-use change driven by residential development has degraded native ecosystems and altered the composition of species communities. Concern over the loss of habitat for human-sensitive species has led to questions about how housing impacts bird communities along the urban to rural gradient. Yet most studies of birds in residential ecos...

Woodland reduction has been under way for decades to improve habitat for certain wildlife species, increase forage for livestock, improve watershed function and reduce soil erosion, and increase plant community heterogeneity. Land managers have implemented a variety of techniques to reduce woodlands. Yet most studies on outcomes are observational a...

Forested ecosystems in the western United States have been the focus of tree reduction efforts for decades, with the intent of improving forage for livestock and wildlife. Yet, the long-term consequences of tree removal for biodiversity are virtually unknown. We conducted bird and vegetation surveys in northwestern Colorado where trees were mechani...

Removing tree cover is a common forest management practice, and pinyon-juniper woodlands in the western United States have been the focus of tree reduction efforts for decades. The scale and intensity of tree removal practices are expected to increase as technology advances and as land managers are tasked with meeting multiple objectives, including...

Habitat alteration to benefit hunted species has been implemented for centuries. These practices are most prevalent on public and private lands where management is funded through hunting licenses and hunting tourism. Habitat management for game species is globally widespread and can take diverse forms — e.g. tree reduction to enhance forage for dee...

Scientists are increasingly using Twitter as a tool for communicating science. Twitter can promote scholarly discussion, disseminate research rapidly, and extend and diversify the scope of audiences reached. However, scientists also caution that if Twitter does not accurately convey science due to the inherent brevity of this media, misinformation...

The Invaders of Texas program is a successful citizen science program in which volunteers survey and monitor invasive plants throughout Texas. Invasive plants are being introduced at alarming rates, and our limited knowledge about their distribution is a major cause for concern. The Invaders of Texas program trains citizen scientists to detect the...