I’m a macroecologist that works with large ecological datasets, remote sensing data, and species distribution models to examine how environmental change impacts wildlife across spatiotemporal scales. In my previous position at UW-Madison and collaborating closely with the Cornell lab of Ornithology, I used dynamic SDMs, machine learning methods and citizen science (eBird) data to assess responses of birds to extreme weather over eastern North America. During my PhD at the University of South Florida, I modeled large-scale relationships between climate, weather, species-level traits and wildlife disease prevalence.
In my current position in the Jetz lab, I will be examining how large numbers of bird species track their environmental niche (with regards to temperature, precipitation, and productivity) over space and time, how the extent of niche tracking is driven by species’ functional traits and phylogenetic relationships, and how climate change impacts their ability to track environmental conditions.
Cohen, J., Fink, D., Zuckerberg, B. 2020. Avian responses to extreme weather across functional traits and temporal scales. Global Change Biology, 26(8), 4240-4250.
Cohen, J., Sauer, E.L., Santiago, O.*, Spencer, S.*, Rohr, J.R. 2020. Divergent impacts of warming weather on wildlife disease risk across climates. Science, 370, eabb1702.
Cohen, J., Lajeunesse, M., Rohr, J. 2018. A global synthesis of animal phenological responses to climate change. Nature Climate Change, 8, 224-228.
Cohen, J., Venesky, M., Sauer, E., Civitello, D., McMahon, T., Roznik, B., Rohr, J. 2017. The thermal mismatch hypothesis explains outbreaks of an emerging infectious disease. Ecology Letters, 20 (2), 184-193.
Cohen, J., Civitello, D., Brace, A., Feichtinger, E., Ortega, N., Richardson, J., Sauer, E.L., Rohr, J. 2016. Spatial scale modulates the strength of ecological processes driving disease distributions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, E3359-E3364.