Author: Matthew Kauffman

Dr. Matthew Kauffman grew up in rural southern Oregon, the son of a horse logger and an elementary schoolteacher. He received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Oregon in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003. Since 2006, Matt has worked as a USGS researcher with the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and as faculty in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming; in 2010 he assumed leadership of the Wyoming Coop Unit. Matt leads a scientific team at the University of Wyoming that studies the long-distance migrations of large ungulates and communicates their importance to the public. His research seeks to understand how and why ungulates migrate, by evaluating the role of forage, movement, fat dynamics, reproduction and survival. Increasingly, he has sought to understand how the persistence of ungulate migration is threatened by landscape change. In 2012, Matt co-founded (and now directs) the Wyoming Migration Initiative (migrationinitiative.org), whose mission is to advance the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Wyoming’s migratory ungulates. He teaches graduate seminars in quantitative analysis of spatial wildlife data, community ecology of wildlife, and migration ecology. In 2024 he was awarded The Aldo Leopold by the American Association of Mammalogists for his research on ungulates.

Wildlife

Wild Odysseys: Greater Yellowstone Migrations Hold An American Ecosystem Together

An uplifting success story: How Wyoming became a global hub for thinking about terrestrial animal movement. And why efforts to preserve long-distance treks of pronghorn, mule deer, elk and other species make it a model for pondering large landscape conservation

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