About

Alex McInturff is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Unit Leader at the Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit within the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. His research areas include conservation science, environmental justice, landscape ecology, nature-human interactions, statistics, spatial analysis, modeling, and wildlife science. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on understanding complex socio-ecological systems, human-wildlife interactions, and environmental justice issues, contributing to the development of more convivial human–predator interactions and addressing pathways between people, wildlife, and environmental justice in urban contexts.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Environmental resource management
• Geography
• Environmental science
• Engineering
• Environmental planning
• Computer Science
• Engineering ethics
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• Public relations

Selected publications

• A 2.5 km Movement by a Potentially Ill White‐Tailed Deer Along Nantasket Beach in Suburban Massachusetts, <scp>USA</scp>

  Ecology and Evolution · 2026-05-01

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT White‐tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) ecology has received significant research attention, yet there is a need for further synthetic work on the species across environmental contexts and research areas. Opportunistic natural history accounts can help identify new conceptual links and research directions by offering new observations and ideas, synthesizing context from the literature, and highlighting gaps in understanding. We provide an opportunistic account of a 2.5 km movement of a white‐tailed deer walking, wading, and swimming along Nantasket Beach in a suburban context in Massachusetts, USA. The deer displayed behaviors that could potentially be reflective of trauma, disorientation, or illness, including possibly symptomatic head movements and crouching behavior. The behavior of the deer may also have been influenced by the coastal and suburban context in which the observation took place. Our account explores swimming, deer behavior, and possible illness in a coastal, suburban context. We highlight the need for additional research on the ecology and management of white‐tailed deer, including swimming and disease in coastal, marine, and developed contexts, and intersections across these areas.

  PublisherDOI

• A multidisciplinary framework for research prioritization at the science-policy interface: Insights for wildlife conservation and management

  Environmental Science & Policy · 2025-11-22

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Coexistence beyond disciplinary silos: Five dimensions of analysis for more convivial human-predator interactions

  Biological Conservation · 2025-05-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding human-predator interactions has been a central goal of conservation for decades, yet many previous efforts have approached this challenge from disciplinary perspectives focused on single case studies. There is a need for more transdisciplinary and multi-sited research to enrich our understandings of the complexity of human-nonhuman interactions and to design ways to make them more convivial. The multi-year CONVIVA “convivial conservation” research project addressed this gap, involving scholars from natural sciences, social sciences and humanities to promote coexistence, biodiversity and justice in conservation across four diverse case studies of apex predators: jaguars in Brazil, wolves in Finland, lions in Tanzania, and brown bears in California, United States. In this article, we set out two key contributions. First, we highlight how our project created iterative, dialogue-based reflections amongst different disciplines and perspectives to inform research questions, methods and units of analysis, fulfilling what we see as a key need in the literature. Second, we operationalise our collaboration beyond disciplinary silos into a novel framework of five interconnected dimensions of analysis, that characterise human-predator interactions, drawing on a range of lenses and including a series of guiding questions. We also showcase empirical material from our cases across wildlife, environment, interactions, institutions and justice dimensions. We present our approach, framework and findings with collective reflections and an invitation for adaptation and further research on their suitability to other contexts and species.

  PublisherDOI

• Triangulating habitat suitability for the locally extirpated California grizzly bear

  Biological Conservation · 2025-02-07 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pathways between people, wildlife and environmental justice in cities

  People and Nature · 2025-02-10 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Wildlife are increasingly recognized as critical to urban ecosystems, but the impacts and benefits of wildlife on people in cities are poorly understood. Environmental justice scholarship has concluded that elements of the urban environment can create or exacerbate social inequity, but human–wildlife interactions have not been considered through this lens. We conducted a literature review on urban wildlife, human–wildlife interactions and environmental justice. We triangulated between these three bodies of literature to identify trends, gaps and research needs. We identified six pathways through which wildlife presence or absence, wildlife management and human–wildlife interactions in cities may lead to social injustice for people. Our review shows that wildlife affect nearly all aspects of urban life for people, including economics, participation in decision‐making, patterns of urban space, human health, psychological well‐being and cultural discourses. Through these six pathways, urban wildlife management disproportionately impacts marginalized and vulnerable communities and benefits affluent urban residents. Contemporary intersections of urban planning, wildlife management and histories of systemic bias exacerbate existing injustices in cities. Synthesis and applications . Though wildlife are often characterized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on their effects on people, we conclude that this dichotomy perpetuates injustice for people and wildlife. Instead, we argue that a ‘just city’ fosters healthy wildlife populations through equitable decision‐making. The pathways we lay out here offer a road map for incorporating environmental justice into urban wildlife management. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The socio‐ecological niche

  People and Nature · 2025-04-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Ecologists recognise that we live on an increasingly human‐dominated planet, yet most of the field's foundational concepts remain essentially biophysical, with little reference to human society. There are few better examples of this divide between ecological and social theory than the niche concept. During its century‐long history, the niche concept has been defined in many ways, including to describe the ecological roles of humans. To date, however, it has not incorporated human influences into its various descriptions of other species' ecological roles. In this essay, we present the socio‐ecological niche (SEN) concept, which builds on the literature in niche theory by contributing insights from the social sciences and humanities to better understand the roles of non‐human species in modern socio‐ecological systems. We argue that the SEN enriches the niche concept and offers a point of connection between ecology and justice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hunting mode and habitat selection mediate the success of human hunters

  Movement Ecology · 2024-04-16 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: As a globally widespread apex predator, humans have unprecedented lethal and non-lethal effects on prey populations and ecosystems. Yet compared to non-human predators, little is known about the movement ecology of human hunters, including how hunting behavior interacts with the environment. METHODS: We characterized the hunting modes, habitat selection, and harvest success of 483 rifle hunters in California using high-resolution GPS data. We used Hidden Markov Models to characterize fine-scale movement behavior, and k-means clustering to group hunters by hunting mode, on the basis of their time spent in each behavioral state. Finally, we used Resource Selection Functions to quantify patterns of habitat selection for successful and unsuccessful hunters of each hunting mode. RESULTS: Hunters exhibited three distinct and successful hunting modes ("coursing", "stalking", and "sit-and-wait"), with coursings as the most successful strategy. Across hunting modes, there was variation in patterns of selection for roads, topography, and habitat cover, with differences in habitat use of successful and unsuccessful hunters across modes. CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicates that hunters can successfully employ a diversity of harvest strategies, and that hunting success is mediated by the interacting effects of hunting mode and landscape features. Such results highlight the breadth of human hunting modes, even within a single hunting technique, and lend insight into the varied ways that humans exert predation pressure on wildlife.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Movement behavior in a dominant ungulate underlies successful adjustment to a rapidly changing landscape following megafire

  Movement Ecology · 2024-07-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Movement plays a key role in allowing animal species to adapt to sudden environmental shifts. Anthropogenic climate and land use change have accelerated the frequency of some of these extreme disturbances, including megafire. These megafires dramatically alter ecosystems and challenge the capacity of several species to adjust to a rapidly changing landscape. Ungulates and their movement behaviors play a central role in the ecosystem functions of fire-prone ecosystems around the world. Previous work has shown behavioral plasticity is an important mechanism underlying whether large ungulates are able to adjust to recent changes in their environments effectively. Ungulates may respond to the immediate effects of megafire by adjusting their movement and behavior, but how these responses persist or change over time following disturbance is poorly understood. METHODS: We examined how an ecologically dominant ungulate with strong site fidelity, Columbian black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus), adjusted its movement and behavior in response to an altered landscape following a megafire. To do so, we collected GPS data from 21 individual female deer over the course of a year to compare changes in home range size over time and used resource selection functions (RSFs) and hidden Markov movement models (HMMs) to assess changes in behavior and habitat selection. RESULTS: We found compelling evidence of adaptive capacity across individual deer in response to megafire. Deer avoided exposed and severely burned areas that lack forage and could be riskier for predation immediately following megafire, but they later altered these behaviors to select areas that burned at higher severities, potentially to take advantage of enhanced forage. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that despite their high site fidelity, deer can navigate altered landscapes to track rapid shifts in encounter risk with predators and resource availability. This successful adjustment of movement and behavior following extreme disturbance could help facilitate resilience at broader ecological scales.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate change as a global amplifier of human–wildlife conflict

  Nature Climate Change · 2023 · 224 citations

  • Sociology
  • Environmental resource management
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Including Rural America in academic conservation science

  Frontiers in Conservation Science · 2023-10-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  OPINION article Front. Conserv. Sci., 20 October 2023Sec. Conservation Social Sciences Volume 4 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2023.1227227

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kaitlyn M. Gaynor

  University of British Columbia

  41 shared

• Justin S. Brashares

  25 shared

• Kendall L. Calhoun

  University of California, Los Angeles

  12 shared

• David J. Kurz

  University of California, Berkeley

  10 shared

• Christine E. Wilkinson

  California Academy of Sciences

  9 shared

• Hillary S. Young

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  8 shared

• Briana Abrahms

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• Peter S. Alagona

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• SEFS Endowed Professorships