Prospective Students

Justin Kitzes

  • Assistant Professor
  • Quantitative Ecology and Conservation

Contact

justin.kitzes@pitt.edu
Office: (412) 383-4402
103 Clapp Hall
4249 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
View Website ›

Research in the Kitzes Lab focuses on measuring, understanding, and predicting biodiversity loss on a planet increasingly dominated by human activities. The central question that guides our research is

How does human alteration of natural habitat impact species abundance and diversity at large spatial scales?

In order to answer this question, we pursue three complementary research themes.

  • Bioacoustics: To improve our ability to measure biodiversity change in the field, we develop new methods and tools for surveying biodiversity using automated acoustic recorders and machine learning models.
  • Conservation: To better understand and prevent impacts on individual species, we conduct field surveys and data analysis focused on understanding the relationships between specific species populations, habitat changes, and human activities.
  • Spatial Macroecology: To better explain and predict large scale biodiversity patterns, we develop new theory and models that seek to uncover the general patterns and processes underlying species distributions and community organization.

Our research involves a wide variety of taxa, although our main groups of interest at the moment are temperate breeding birds and anurans. All of our work is heavily quantitative, drawing on both mathematical and computational methods. Our work has been financially supported by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, Microsoft, the Moore Foundation, and the Academic Data Science Alliance.

Kitzes, J., Berlow, E., Conlisk, E., Erb, K., I

Kitzes, J., Berlow, E., Conlisk, E., Erb, K., Iha, K., Martinez, N., Newman, E. A., Plutzar, C., Smith, A. B., & Harte, J. (in press) Consumption-based conservation targeting: Linking biodiversity loss to economic consumption through a global wildlife footprint. Conservation Letters.

Wilson, G., Bryan, J., Cranston, K., Kitzes, J.

Wilson, G., Bryan, J., Cranston, K., Kitzes, J., Nederbragt, L., & Teal, T. K. (in press). Good enough practices for scientific computing. PLoS Computational Biology.

Kelly, R., Kitzes, J., Wilson, H., & Merenl

Kelly, R., Kitzes, J., Wilson, H., & Merenlender, A. (2016) Habitat diversity promotes bat activity in a vineyard landscape. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 223, 175-181.

Kitzes, J., & Wilber, M. (2016) macroeco: R

Kitzes, J., & Wilber, M. (2016) macroeco: Reproducible ecological pattern analysis in Python. Ecography 39, 361-367.

Kitzes, J., & Shirley, R. Estimating biodiv

Kitzes, J., & Shirley, R. Estimating biodiversity impacts without field surveys: A case study in northern Borneo. Ambio 45(1), 110-119.

Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2015). Predicting

Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2015). Predicting extinction debt from community patterns. Ecology 96(8), 2172-2136.

Wilber, M., Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2015).

Wilber, M., Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2015). Scale collapse and the emergence of the power law species-area relationship. Global Ecology and Biogeography 24(8), 883–895.

McGlinn, D., Xiao, X., Kitzes, J., & White,

McGlinn, D., Xiao, X., Kitzes, J., & White, E. (2015). Exploring the spatially explicit predictions of the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24(6), 675-684.

Harte, J., & Kitzes, J. (2014). Inferring r

Harte, J., & Kitzes, J. (2014). Inferring regional-scale species diversity from small-plot censuses. PLoS ONE 10(2), e0117527.

Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2014). Beyond the

Kitzes, J., & Harte, J. (2014). Beyond the species-area relationship: Improving macroecological extinction estimates. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5(1), 1-8.

Kitzes, J., & Merenlender, A. (2014). Large

Kitzes, J., & Merenlender, A. (2014). Large roads reduce bat activity across multiple species. PLoS ONE 5(1), 1-8.

Kitzes, J., & Merenlender, A. (2013). Extin

Kitzes, J., & Merenlender, A. (2013). Extinction risk and tradeoffs in reserve site selection for species of different body sizes. Conservation Letters 6(5), 341-349.

Kitzes, J. (2013). An introduction to environme

Kitzes, J. (2013). An introduction to environmentally-extended input-output analysis. Resources 2(4), 489-503.

Harte, J., Kitzes, J., Newman, E., & Roming

Harte, J., Kitzes, J., Newman, E., & Rominger, A. (2013). Taxon categories and the universal species-area relationship. The American Naturalist 181(2), 282-287.

Ramage, B. S., Kitzes, J., Marshalek, E. C., &a

Ramage, B. S., Kitzes, J., Marshalek, E. C., & Potts, M. D. (2013). Optimized Floating Refugia: A new strategy for species conservation in production forest landscapes. Biodiversity and Conservation 22(3), 789-801.

Ramage, B. S., Marshalek, E. C., Kitzes, J., &a

Ramage, B. S., Marshalek, E. C., Kitzes, J., & Potts, M. D. (2013). Conserving tropical biodiversity via strategic spatiotemporal harvest planning. Journal of Applied Ecology 50(6), 1301–1310.

Barnosky, A. D., Hadly, E. A., Bascompte, J., B

Barnosky, A. D., Hadly, E. A., Bascompte, J., Berlow, E. L., Brown, J. H., Fortelius, M., Getz, W. M., Harte, J., Hastings, A., Marquet, P. A., Martinez, N. D., Mooers, A., Roopnarine, P., Vermeij, G., Williams, J. W., Gillespie, R., Kitzes, J., Marshall, C., Matzke, N., Mindell, D. P., Revilla, E., & Smith, A. B. (2012). Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature 486, 52-58.

Leach, A. M., Galloway, J. N., Bleeker, A, Eris

Leach, A. M., Galloway, J. N., Bleeker, A, Erisman, J.W., Kohn, R., & Kitzes, J. (2012). A nitrogen footprint model to help consumers understand their role in nitrogen losses to the environment. Environmental Development 1, 40-66.

Galli, A., Kitzes, J., Niccolucci, V., Wackerna

Galli, A., Kitzes, J., Niccolucci, V., Wackernagel, M., Wada, Y., & Marchettini, N. (2012). Assessing the global environmental consequences of economic growth through the Ecological Footprint: a focus on China and India. Ecological Indicators 17, 99-107.
Dr. Kitzes received his Ph.D. in 2012 with John Harte and Adina Merenlender at the University of California, Berkeley, was a postdoctoral scholar in the Energy and Resources Group and a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, both at UC Berkeley, and joined the Department in 2017.