Mahdieh Tourani is a PostDoc in the Karp Lab in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at the University of California, Davis. Mahdieh completed her PhD in 2020 at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Applied Quantitative Ecology. During her PhD, she applied hierarchical analytical models to several sets of non-invasive carnivore monitoring data from Scandinavia and the Himalayas to address population-level questions, including estimation of density, abundance, distribution, and space use. After her PhD, she continued working in the same lab as a postdoctoral researcher and extended her research to density estimation of ungulates in a collaboration with the Bavarian State Institute of Forestry. In this project, she quantified the spatial variation in red deer density in relation to forest management in the Bohemian Forest Ecosystem.
As a Postdoc in the Karp Lab, in a collaboration with Rahel Sollmann, Mahdieh is analyzing large-scale camera trapping data from Wildlife Insights, an open-source platform developed by Conservation International and others to share and analyze wildlife data worldwide. She explores the impacts of global change on trends in wildlife occurrence and distributions. She also produces basic analytics for the Wildlife Insights platform to allow data contributors and other users to explore and visualize their own data.