Research

My research integrates the natural and social sciences to investigate how to build better futures and better policies. See below for recent publications and summaries of a sampling of my past and current projects.

• Policy

  I currently lead The Nature Conservancy in Colorado's electrical transmission policy work, including close engagement with the Colorado Electrical Transmission Authority and on Colorado state legislation, such as on a bill to ease co-location of electrical transmission with highways.
  I also conduct research on how policies affect people and wildlife. I presented research on how including how policies might enable more constructive community engagement at the 2024 North American Congress on Conservation Biology.
• Renewable energy

  How do expanding renewable energy infrastructure imapct birds? I am using historical data on birds and wind turbines and generative Bayesian models to estimate these impacts. I'm also working to synthesize research on the indirect effects of renwable energy on birds, both projects in collaboration with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
• Relational thinking

  Does treating things, and our knowledge of them, as emerging from relationships — i.e., adopting relational thinking — enhance our understanding of coupled human--natural systems? In our recent paper, Drs. Kai Chan, Terre Satterfield, and I survey a range of empirical examples from many different disciplines to show that the answer is yes. The paper is freely available:

  Eyster, H. N., Satterfield, T., & Chan, K. M. A. (2023). Empirical examples demonstrate how relational thinking might enrich science and practice. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10453. Twitter thread summary.

  Can we also extend cultural ecosystem services to be about *relationships* and about humans and nature reciprocally serving each other? We lay out the argument for doing just that in this book chapter:

  Chan, K. M. A., Gould, R. K., de la Lama, R. L., & Eyster, H. N. (2025). What if cultural ecosystem services were relational? a research agenda for nature’s contributions to well-being—and human action. In P. D. McElwee, K. E. Allen, R. K. Gould, M. Hsu, & J. He (Eds.), The routledge handbook of cultural ecosystem services (pp. 442–454). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003414896.

• Fostering social sciences in conservation

  There's now widspread agreement that the social sciences are key to conservation science. But are social scientists actually included in the field of conservation? And what can conservation organizations do to include social scientists and the science we do? Six and a half years after starting the Disciplinary Inclusion Task Force and many hours of working with fantastic colleagues, we published two papers to answer these questions in *Conservation Biology* in 2024. Through a case study of The Society for Conservation Biology, document analyses, and surveys, these papers show that while biologists see conservation organizations as equitable and inclusive, social scientists and people from marginalized backgrounds do not. We outline recommendations (https://lnkd.in/grCF2Uiy) and create an epistemic justice framework (https://lnkd.in/gKkrnpZn) to show how conservation organizations can include the more diverse disciplines necessary to address today's conservation challenges. Both papers are available here:

  Winkler-Schor, S., Eyster, H. N., Lobo, D., Redmore, L., Wright, A. J., Lukasik, V. M., Chávez-Páez, W., Tully, B., Beard, S., Blount-Hill, K.-L., Christen, C., & Nyssa, Z. (2024). Enhancing disciplinary diversity and inclusion in conservation science and practice based on a case study of the society for conservation biology. Conservation Biology, 38 (6). https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14395.

  Nyssa, Z., Winkler-Schor, S., Lobo, D., Eyster, H. N., & Wright, A. J. (2024). A framework for promoting disciplinary diversity and inclusion through epistemic justice. Conservation Biology, 38 (6). https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14409.

  Huge thank you to Sophia Winkler-Schor for your indefatigable and wise leadership, and to all of co-authors: Diele Lobo, Lauren Redmore, Andrew Wright, Victoria Lukasik, PhD, Wendy Chávez Páez, Brook Tully, Sarah Beard, Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, Catherine Christen, Zoe Nyssa, and also to the many people who supported this project, served as reviewers, and generously shared their time participating in interviews and surveys. Although social sciences are critical for conservation, but many lack the training or resources to carry out this work. In a paper led by Diane Detoeuf, we analyzed this gap and assembled a database of resources. See the paper here:

  Detoeuf, D., Lange, E. d., Ibbett, H., Gupta, T., Monterrubio Solı́s, C., Mavakala, K., Catapani, M. L., Kretser, H. E., Milner-Gulland, E. J., Brittain, S., Newing, H., Fariss, B., Spira, C., Eyster, H. N., DeMello, N., Wallen, K. E., Thornton, S. A., Bennett, N. J., & Choo, L. L. (2025). Gap analysis of social science resources for conservation practice. *Conservation Biology*, 39 (2).https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14463.

  How much conservation research is social science? And does this social science benefit from theory about why people do what they do? We examined all papers published in 2023 in leading conservation journals and found that about 1/3 were social science, and about 1/3 of social papers on human action used human action theories. But these theories were dominated by just a few theories that try to explain individual, short-term actions. We also presented a map to help scientists adopt a broader set of human action theories.

  Eyster, H. N., Gould, R. K., Chan, K. M. A., & Satterfield, T. (2025). Use of theories of human action in recent conservation research. Conservation Biology, 39(2). doi: 10.1111/cobi.14461. Summary on LinkedIn.

  Tools like reflexivity and positionality from social sciences can also be fruitfully applied to environmental and natural sciences. In this paper, co-authors and I lay out the benefits of reflexivity and offer a practical guide on how to do it:

  Phurisamban, R., Luna, E., Eyster, H. N., Chignell, S., & Koppes, M. (2025). Shedding the cloak of neutrality: A guide for reflexive practices to make the sciences more inclusive and just. Ecosphere, 16 (4).https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70168.

• Bird range changes and climate change

  Does macroecological theory about range orientations predict how species move with climate change?

  Gilbert, N. A., Kolbe, S. R., Eyster, H. N., & Grinde, A. R. (2024). Can internal range structure predict range shifts? Journal of Animal Ecology, 93 (10), 1556–1566. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14168.

  How are bird elevational ranges shifting with climate change?

  Freeman, B. G., Eyster, H. N., Heavyside, J. M., Yip, D. A., Mather, M. H., & Waterhouse, F. L. (2025). Pacific Northwest birds have shifted their abundances upslope in response to 30 years of warming temperatures. Ecology, 106 (9). https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.70193. Bluesky summary. LinkedIn summary.

• Human action theories

  Why do people do what they do? Understanding these theories of human action can help conservationists and other practitioners identify how to achieve more sustainable worlds. However, these theories are dispersed across many different fields and are based on different meta-theories. I am synthesizing these theories to provide a map of the human action theories. I presented this work at the 2019 Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, UK, and published this open access map of human action theories in *Annual Review of Environment and Resources*:

  Eyster, H. N., Satterfield, T., & Chan, K. M. A. (2022). Why people do what they do: an interdisciplinary synthesis of human action theories. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 47. [https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-020422-125351</a>. Twitter thread summary.

  Which theories are actually being used in conservation? With Rachelle Gould, Kai Chan, and Terre Satterfield, I censused the three conservation journals and found that just a handful of theories, like Theory of Planned Behavior, are used, and that there may be many fruitful opportunities for greater and more targeted human action theory application. Free paper here:

  Eyster, H. N., Gould, R. K., Chan, K. M. A., & Satterfield, T. (2025). Use of theories of human action in recent conservation research. Conservation Biology, 39(2). doi: 10.1111/cobi.14461. Summary on LinkedIn.

  I also contributed to Chapter 5 of the Intergovernmental Science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment, and to a resulting paper.
• Relational values

  Does thinking about values as properties of relationships, rather than properties of individual people, help us understand conservation motivations? Using surveys of British Columbians and econometrics, I study how relational values can help show how to motivate people to conserve widespread species. See our recent paper:

  Eyster, H. N., Olmsted, P., Naidoo, R., & Chan, K. M. A. (2022). Motivating conservation even for widespread species using genetic uniqueness and relational values. Biological Conservation, 266, 109438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109438. Available free here. Data here. And my twitter thread.

  I also contributed to Chapter 4 of the Intergovernmental Science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. And to two papers that resulted from the Values Assessment research, including one on values in protected areas, and one on a review of values in behavior theories.

  Chaplin-Kramer, R., Neugarten, R. A., Gonzalez-Jimenez, D., Ahmadia, G., Baird, T. D., Crane, N., Delgoulet, E., Eyster, H. N., Kurashima, N., Llopis, J. C., Millington, A., Pawlowska-Mainville, A., Rulmal, J., Saunders, F., Shrestha, S., Vaughan, M. B., Winter, K. B., Wongbusarakum, S., & Pascual, U. (2023). Transformation for inclusive conservation: Evidence on values, decisions, and impacts in protected areas. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 64, 101347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101347.

  Gould, R. K., Soares, T. M., Arias-Arévalo, P., Cantú-Fernandez, M., Baker, D., Eyster, H. N., Kwon, R., Prox, L., Rode, J., Suarez, A., Vatn, A., & Zúñiga-Barragán, J. (2023). The role of value(s) in theories of human behavior. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 64, 101355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101355.

• Urban socio-ecological systems

  I study the complex and interdependent web that are urban socio-ecological systems, with a focus on Metro Vancouver, BC, Canada. This work began when I was a PhD student at The University of British Columbia and received funding through UBC's BRITE research internship to resurvey the birds of Vancouver. While at UBC, I also started work with Nicole Jung on lichens and bryophytes of Vancouver. This urban work grew into a Gund Postdoctoral Fellowship at The University of Vermont, where I studied the complex interrelationships between birds, heat waves, trees, and people of Metro Vancouver to better understand how Vancouver could create urban flourishing. I'm now continuing this work with UBC PhD student Daniel Forrest, with a focus on applying political ecology to the ecological question of how urban food waste (often indirectly) affects urban wildlife. Relatedly, I'm also working with Chadi Saad-Roy and Kai Chan to model (both theoretically and empirically) how food waste and other forms of anthropogenic subsidies shape the transmission and evolution of avian pathogens.
  

  Landcover

  How can we estimate historical urban landcover, since historical imagery is often low quality? We developed a deep-learning pipeline for accurately classifying low-quality aerial imagery.

  Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2024). Applying a deep learning pipeline to classify land cover from low-quality historical rgb imagery. PeerJ Computer Science, 10, e2003.https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.2003.

  Heat waves and climate models

  How can cities stave off heat waves? Brian Beckage and I used Bayesian models and Landsat data to show that coniferous trees may be key for ameliorating heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. In a second paper, we asked, What causes this enhanced cooling by conifers? We developed system dynamics models of physical climate to show that three key tree traits seem to drive conifer cooling.

  Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2022). Conifers may ameliorate urban heat waves better than broadleaf trees: Evidence from vancouver, canada. Atmosphere, 13 (5), 830. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13050830. Twitter thread.

  Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2023). Arboreal urban cooling is driven by leaf area index, leaf boundary layer resistance, and dry leaf mass per leaf area: Evidence from a system dynamics model. Atmosphere, 14 (3), 552. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14030552. Twitter thread summary.

  Trees and people

  How are conifers vs. broadleaf trees perceived by people? Using ecological grief, we show that conifers and broadleaf trees are both equally important, and suggests that conifers can be grown without disrupting people's relationships with their neighborhood trees.

  Eyster, H. N., & Gould, R. K. (2025). Measuring ecological grief to guide inclusive urban forest management. *Canadian Journal of Forest Research*, 55, 1–8.https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2025-0092.

  Birds

  Across North America, bird populations are plummeting: Since 1970, North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds. Much of these losses come from common, abundant species. To understand how Greater Vancouver can help to revert this decline,I received a grant to work with Stewardship Centre for BC and Birds Canada. I replicated > 500 bird point counts and >300 transect surveys across the metro region that were originally conducted in the 1960s, '70s and '90s. conducting bird, plant, and landscape surveys across Greater Vancouver. We found that Vancouver's birds have declined by 26% since 1997, and that space-for-time subsitutions only partially explain these changes. Our paper also shows the importance of accounting for scale-dependent habitat-relationships. We also found that non-native birds are declining particularly rapidly.

  Eyster, H. N., Chan, K. M. A., Fletcher, M., & Beckage, B. (2024). Space-for-time substitutions exaggerate urban bird–habitat ecological relationships. Journal of Animal Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14194.

  Birds and people

  Do these declines in non-native birds matter? As a birder, ornithologist, but also an anticolonial researcher, I've often marveled at the various ways that birds like House Sparrows and European Starlings are perceived by different people. Using ecological grief, cultural ecosystem services, and a survey, a forthcoming paper shows that most groups of people in Metro Vancouver perceive non-native species as just as important as native ones; only White people perceive non-native species as less important than native species.

  Lichens and mosses

  I co-supervised UBC undergraduate student Nicole Jung to understand the drivers of urban epiphyte diversity. We found that reframing epiphytes not as *instrumental* indicators of pollution, but as *relational* members of urban ecological communities enables insights into their ecology.

  Jung∗, N. J., Eyster, H. N., & Chan, K. M. (2025). Re-envisioning urban landscapes: Lichens, liverworts, and mosses coexist spontaneously with us. *Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment*. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2836.

  Bats

  I advised UBC Masters student Julia Craig to understand the drivers of urban bat diversity. See her MSc thesis.

  People and nature

  More and more people are living in cities, and discovering how to build cities that equitably serve people is becoming increasingly important. However, much of the current literature focuses on people (environmental justice) *or* nature (ecological justice, biodiveristy), which may prevent integrative solutions that could help all urban residents flourish. With Rachelle K. Gould and Mayra I. Rodríguez González, I develop frameworks for thinking about human and non-human justice in tandem. Humans and nature are mutually entwined, especially in cities; justice frameworks should reflect this inseparability.

  Eyster, H. N., Rodrı́guez González, M. I., & Gould, R. K. (2024). Green gentrification & the luxury effect: Uniting isolated ideas towards just cities for people & nature. Ecosystems and People, 20 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2399621.

• Quantitative methods

  Bayesian methods: I'm working with Brian Beckage to past and present landcover and bird abundance to build multispecies abundance models using a Bayesian framework in Stan. These models will identify trends in local bird diversity, what is driving them, and how Vancouver can begin to reverse them. Moreover, by combining these data with data that Jaylen Bastos and the Stewardship Centre for BC is collecting on roaming cat density (in another study), priority areas for cat awareness and management will be identified. More information about these studies can be found here. Average predictive comparisons: As modelling frameworks become more complex, it can be difficult to isolate the effects of different variables. Average predictive comparison provide a method for this estimation. However, they have rarely been used because they can be complicated to implement. I am creating an implementation of average predictive comparisons in a Bayesian framework using Stan . See my explanatory document on github. Collaborators: Dr. Elizabeth Wolkovich and Dr. Geoffrey Legault Propagating uncertainty: Bayesian methods can help to propagate uncertainty in ecological models, and can be key for revealing causation:

  Gilbert, N. A., Eyster, H. N., & Zipkin, E. F. (2023). Propagating uncertainty in ecological models to understand causation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 21 (3), 114–115. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2610.

• Bird conservation and community ecology in agriculture fields

  Perhaps the biggest way that people are connected to nature is through their food consumption. Unfortunately, the corn and soy monocultures in the American Midwest provide little habitat for birds. Some farmers are experimenting with perennial polyculture fields to support biodiversity and provide food and livelihoods. I conducted bird and plant surveys at 13 of these polyculture farms in 2018, along with adjacent woods, prairies, and monocultures. I built multispecies abundance models in Stan and found that these polycultures do indeed provide superior habitat for birds. See our freely-available recent paper:

  Eyster, H. N., Srivastava, D. S., Kreitzman, M., & Chan, K. M. A. (2022). Functional traits and metacommunity theory reveal that habitat filtering and competition maintain bird diversity in a human shared landscape. Ecography, 2022, Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.06240. Twitter Summary.

  Another paper compares a whole suite of biophysical metrics across perennial polycultures and traditional agricultural fields:

  Kreitzman, M., Eyster, H. N., Mitchell, M., Czajewska, A., Keeley, K., Smukler, S., Sullivan, N., Verster, A., & Chan, K. M. A. (2022). Woody perennial polycultures in the U.S. Midwest enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions. *Ecosphere*, *13*(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3890. Twitter summary. Data

• Climate change ecology

  What causes some plants to become invasive and others not? Are some species able to rapidly evolve to excel in a novel environment? Or are they able to flourish in a novel environment without adapting? And what does this mean for how invasive plants might respond to climate change? For my undergraduate thesis research, I collected plant seeds from their native range in Europe and invasive range in North America, grew them in a variety of climates in growth chambers and then used multilevel models in Stan to understand if these seven species had rapidly evolved since invasion. See our recent publication:

  Eyster, H. N., & Wolkovich, E. M. (2021). Comparisons in the native and introduced ranges reveal little evidence of climatic adaptation in germination traits. Climate Change Ecology, 2, 100023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecochg.2021.100023. twitter thread summary. Data.

• Tourist preferences for African Protected Areas

  What aspects of African Protected Areas attract tourists? The 'Big five' megafauna are often seen as key features of any park, but do they drive visits? Drs. Kai Chan, Robin Naidoo, and I used data on animal presense, visitation rates, and other landscape data to show that tourist preferences extend beyond the Big Five to include bird diversity. We also observed that ecotourism may be well suited to conserve bird diversity, lion, cheetah, black and white rhinoceros, African wild dog and giraffe species.

  Eyster, H. N., Naidoo, R., & Chan, K. M. A. (2022). Not just the Big Five: African ecotourists prefer parks brimming with bird diversity. Animal Conservation. https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12816

  In a follow-up response to commentary, we call for local sociecological visions to guide ecotourism:

  Eyster, H. N., Naidoo, R., & Chan, K. M. A. (2023). Towards ecotourism that nurtures local visions for landscapes and wildlife. Animal Conservation, 26 (4), 448–449. https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12900.

• Sensory ecology and evolution

  I've conducted bird color vision and sensory ecology research with Dr. Mary Caswell Stoddard and her lab since 2013. Much of this recent work has focused on hummingbird vision at the Rocky Mountain Biological Station in Colorado. See our recent paper in *PNAS*:

  Stoddard, M. C., Eyster, H. N., Hogan, B. G., Morris, D. H., Soucy, E. R., & Inouye, D. W. (2020). Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (26), 15112–15122.https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919377117. Twitter thread summary.

  This research has also included building MatLab software to detect bird eggs and model egg perceptability to predators:

  Stoddard, M. C., Kupán, K., Eyster, H. N., Rojas-Abreu, W., Cruz-López, M., Serrano-Meneses, M. A., & Küpper, C. (2016). Camouflage and Clutch Survival in Plovers and Terns. Scientific Reports, 6 (January), 32059. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32059.

  Often, biologists use artificial stimuli to elicit or test avian behavior. But do these artificial stimuli actually look the way biologists intend? In this paper, we measured a variety of common artificial stimuli and modeled how they likely appear to various animals:

  Stoddard, M. C., Miller, A. E., Eyster, H. N., Akkaynak, D., & Stoddard, M. C. (2018). I see your false colours: how artificial stimuli appear to different animal viewers. Interface Focus, 1 (9). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2018.0053.