Phil is a quantitative ecologist with the Migratory Bird Center at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. For this postdoctoral appointment, he will help the National Park Service improve inventory and monitoring programs, under the guidance of J. Andrew Royle (USGS) and T. Scott Sillett (Smithsonian).
For his dissertation, he researched ways to improve stock assessments of non-migratory dolphins in Hawaiʻi. This included automating photo-identification of these animals, understanding how these automated tools interact with capture-recapture models, and estimating demographic parameters using cutting edge methods in capture recapture. He was a NOAA QUEST Fellow, under the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawai`i and the Cetacean Research Program at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.
He did his master’s with Krishna Pacifici at North Carolina State University, where he studied ways to improve estimates of species distribution, particularly when species interact and when the data contains sampling errors.
Feel free to email me at philtpatton@gmail.com if you would like to get in touch.
