Meet David Blount, David is a 4th year PhD student from the University of Utah, he’s a large carnivore ecologist looking at how animals like bears, wolves and lynx interact with humans and how they are surviving in human dominated ecosystems. His field work takes him to Turkey, where he’s been studying the only population of brown bears in the world that migrate.
Dig Deeper: Although large carnivore numbers are usually small in an ecosystem, they play an incredibly important role as a keystone species. What does it mean to be a keystone species? Why does conserving large carnivores have a big impact on ecosystems (hint: umbrella species).
