Rate My Professor Frances Buderman

Frances E. Buderman is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Wildlife Ecology in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Pennsylvania State University, contributing to Biology through her expertise in wildlife ecology. She completed her B.S. at Cornell University in 2010, M.S. at Pennsylvania State University in 2012, and Ph.D. at Colorado State University in 2017. Buderman's research focuses on quantitative ecology, developing and applying novel statistical methods to study wildlife demography, space-use, movement, and their interactions across ecological scales. Her areas of expertise include Bayesian statistics, hierarchical modeling, applied statistics, movement ecology, demography, and terrestrial wildlife ecology. This work spans numerous taxa and supports various management applications, including predictive modeling for invasive species and habitat selection analysis.

Buderman has published extensively on these topics. Notable works include "Integrated movement models for individual tracking and species distribution data" (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2025), "Changes in waterfowl movement behavior in response to hunting pressure" (Movement Ecology, 2025), "Explaining the divergence of population trajectories for two interacting waterfowl species" (Ecological Monographs, 2025), "A framework for analyzing wild turkey summer sighting data" (Wildlife Society Bulletin, 2025), "Decadal stability in stream fish communities and contemporary ecological drivers of species occupancy in two Appalachian U.S. National Parks" (Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, 2025), "SNAPSHOT USA 2019–2023: The First Five Years of Data From a Coordinated Camera Trap Survey of the United States" (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2025), "Anthropogenic predation risk alters waterfowl habitat selection" (Landscape Ecology, 2024), "Can waterfowl buffer the mortality risk induced by GPS tags? A cautionary tale for applied inference across species" (Animal Biotelemetry, 2024), "Multistage time-to-event models improve survival inference by partitioning mortality processes of tracked organisms" (Scientific Reports, 2024), and "Forecasting animal distribution through individual habitat selection: insights for population inference and transferable predictions" (Ecography, 2024). Her contributions inform wildlife management practices, such as models for locating destructive feral swine, assessing early-nesting duck risks from climate and land-use changes, analyzing Canada geese responses to hunting, and enhancing migration models with GPS and citizen science data. Affiliated with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, she leads the Quantitative Wildlife Ecology Lab.