Living On the Edge: The Ecology of Mountain Goats and Avalanches in Alaska

Speaker: Kevin White, Wildlife Ecologist, University of Alaska Southeast

Survival in extreme environments requires perilous trade-offs. Mountain goats use steep, exposed terrain to avoid carnivores such as wolves, but there can be a significant cost of this behavior – exposure to snow avalanches. In this presentation, Kevin White, a wildlife ecologist with the University of Alaska Southeast, will talk about long-term studies describing the extraordinary natural history and population ecology of mountain goats in coastal Alaska. He will specifically focus on recent analyses seeking to understand how avalanches transform mountain landscapes and alpine wildlife populations that inhabit them. Functioning as ecologically extreme events, avalanches can elicit substantial population declines requiring more than a generation for demographic recovery – highlighting the importance of climate-linked factors for mountain wildlife populations. The exciting multidisciplinary research involved extensive collaboration with University of Alaska snow scientists Eran Hood and Gabe Wolken, and others from the US, Canada and Switzerland.

Kevin White is a wildlife ecologist with the University of Alaska Southeast, Program on the Environment, Department of Natural Sciences. He studies mountain ecology, including how such systems are influenced by ongoing change. Based upon extensive field studies in Alaska, his recent research has been principally focused on the role of climate, weather and snow avalanches on the population ecology of mountain goats.