Chris S Elphick

Chris Elphick is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. His work focuses on the conservation ecology of birds, especially in wetlands, farmlands, and forests. He has been studying coastal marsh birds and their habitats since 2002 and is a lead investigator for the Saltmarsh Habitat and Avian Research Program (SHARP), a collaborative initiative to understand the ecology and conservation of tidal-marsh birds along the Atlantic seaboard. He participated in his first bird atlas in his early teens, mostly surveying blocks no one else wanted to visit (and still finding good birds). His research has been published in journals such as the Auk, Biological Conservation, Condor, Conservation Biology, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Science. Book length projects include the Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Nevada, and the Ecology and Conservation of Birds in Rice Fields: A Global Review.

Min Huang

Min Huang is a wildlife biologist for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection where he leads the Migratory Bird Program. He is also an adjunct research scientist with the University of Connecticut. He has worked as a wildlife biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission where he managed the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area, working primarily with deer and various endangered species such as the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Florida Scrub Jay, and Whooping Crane. He also spent 5 years working for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife as a District Biologist, where he primarily worked with deer, Elk, Mountain Goats and endangered species such as the Spotted Owl and Marbled Murrelet. Other than the current Atlas project, he is involved in several large wetland restoration projects and with studies assessing American Kestrel survival, American Woodcock habitat use and survival in response to management, and the development of a multi-stock decision framework for the harvest management of waterfowl in the Atlantic Flyway.

Samuel Merker

Sam Merker is an avian ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at New Mexico State University. He joined the Connecticut Bird Atlas team in 2021 as a postdoctoral researcher after completing his PhD at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. Sam’s roles in the atlas include data analysis, data quality control, map creation, and webpage creation, among others. Sam has worked with many groups of birds throughout the years including loons, jays, raptors, sparrows, and warblers. Recently, Sam has started and managed a project on American Bitterns in Connecticut and hopes to continue to learn about this state listed species.   

Craig Repasz

Craig Repasz completed a BA degree in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry specializing in data integrity, regulatory compliance, project management, and system and process validations. He is involved in a variety of citizen science projects including compiler for a Christmas Bird Count, territory mapping and point count censuses throughout New England. Craig is a past President of the New Haven Bird Club and President of the Friends of Stewart B McKinney National Wildlife Refuge. He is co-founder and co-chair of Lights Out Connecticut, a special project of the Menunkatuck Audubon Society, an effort to fight light pollution and its impacts on migrating birds throughout the state.

Valerie Steen

Valerie Steen worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut during the early planning and design stages of the atlas project. She has an MSc in Wildlife Biology from the University of Alaska where she studied habitat selection by Black Terns in the Prairie Pothole Region, and a PhD in Ecology from Colorado State University, where she studied climate change impacts to waterbirds, again in the Prairie Potholes. Her research interests center on quantitative approaches for improving estimates of species distributions and population trends, and for working with noisy data. She currently works as a natural resources specialist with the Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands at Colorado State University.

Morgan Tingley

Morgan Tingley is a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his MSc in Zoology from Oxford University, and a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2002, his published research has centered at the intersection of bird distributions and community dynamics with global change ecology. His work is primarily focused on bird communities along temperate elevational gradients, including the Appalachians, the Sierra Nevada of California, and the Himalaya, and how these communities are impacted by anthropogenic change. In 2012, he was awarded the Young Professional Award by the Cooper Ornithological Society, and in 2014 he was awarded a “Wings Across America” conservation award from the USDA Forest Service. A lifelong birder, Tingley has seen over 25% of the world’s bird species; just don’t ask him about his Connecticut list!

 

 

REGIONAL COORDINATORS

Buzz Devine (Northwest)
Sara Zagorski (North-central)
Steve Morytko (Northeast)
Dave Provencher (Southeast)
Melissa Baston (Southeast-central)
Steve Broker (Southwest-central)
Frank Mantlik (Southwest)
Ken Elkins (West-central)