Elizabeth Painter-Flores is a postdoctoral researcher with the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit. Her current research focuses on developing a quantitative tool that incorporates multi-taxa connectivity data within protected areas for use in conservation planning and mitigation decisions.
She earned her PhD from the University of Montana, where her dissertation examined predator-prey dynamics in Idaho by modeling interactions between white-tailed deer populations and their predators. Prior to her doctoral work, she spent three years in Mexico studying jaguars and the impacts of land-use change on wildlife populations, earning her MS degree there.
Her research aims to integrate connectivity modeling with management applications, using quantitative approaches to inform wildlife conservation decisions. She is particularly interested in landscape-scale conservation planning and how multi-species connectivity assessments can improve protected area design and management across different landscapes and cultural contexts. Broadly, her interests include population dynamics, spatial ecology, landscape connectivity, conservation biology and international collaboration in wildlife research.
