College of Agriculture & Natural Resources Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

Areas of Expertise

Mammalian ecology and conservation, sustainable use of wildlife, human-wildlife interactions, international conservation, translational ecology

Education

• Ph.D., Wildlife Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks
• M.S., Natural Resources (Wildlife Emphasis), University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
• B.S. Wildlife/Biology, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

Research Interests

• Carnivore ecology and predator-prey relations
• Wildlife responses to human disturbances
• Improving human-wildlife coexistence through conflict resolution
• Management of harvested wildlife populations
• Integrating wildlife science with policy and practice

Selected Publications

Kellner, K.F., A.D. Smith, J.A. Royle, M. Kéry, I.J. Fiske, J.L. Belant, R.B. Chandler. 2023. The unmarked R package: twelve years of advances in wildlife occurrence and abundance modeling. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14:1408-1415.

Puckett, E.E., et al. 2023. Genetic architecture and evolution of color variation in American black bears. Current Biology 33:86-97.

Tucker, M.A., et al. 2023. Changes in human presence during COVID-19 lockdowns alter the spatial behavior of terrestrial mammals. Science 380:1059-1064.

van den Bosch M, Beyer DE Jr, Gantchoff MG, Kellner KF, MacFarland DM, Norton DC, Patterson BR, Price Tack JL, Roell BJ, Belant JL. 2022. Identifying potential gray wolf habitat and connectivity in the eastern USA. Biological Conservation 273:109708.

Do Linh San E, Sato JJ, Belant JL, Somers MJ. 2022. Small carnivores: evolution, ecology, behavior, and conservation. Wiley-Blackwell, New Jersey, USA.

Gantchoff MG, Conlee L, Boudreau MR, Iglay RB, Anderson C, Belant JL. 2022. Spatially-explicit population modeling to predict large carnivore recovery and expansion. Ecological Modeling 470:110033. 

Kellner KF, Fowler NL, Petroelje TR, Kautz TM, Beyer DE Jr, Belant JL. 2022. Ubms: an R package for fitting hierarchical occupancy and N-mixture abundance models in a Bayesian framework. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13:577–584.

Fowler NL, Kautz TM, Petroelje TR, Wilton CM, Kellner KF, O’Brien DJ, Parsons B, Beyer DE Jr, Belant JL. 2021. Marginal support for a trophic cascade among sympatric canids in peripheral wolf range. Ecology 102:e03494.

Davidson SC, et al. 2020. Ecological insights from three decades of animal movement tracking across a changing Arctic. Science 370:712–715. 

Petroelje TR, Belant JL, Beyer DE, Svoboda NS. 2020. Identification of carnivore kill sites is improved by verified accelerometer data. Animal Biotelemetry 8:18.

Hill JE, DeVault TL, Belant JL. 2020. Anthropogenic mortality in mammals increases with the human footprint. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18:13–18.

Fowler NL, Belant JL, Beyer DE Jr. 2019. Non-linear relationships between human activities and wolf-livestock depredations. Biological Conservation 236:385–392. 

Hill JE, DeVault TL, Belant JL. 2019. Cause-specific mortality of the world’s terrestrial vertebrates. Global Ecology and Biogeography 28:680–689.