Welcome to the Mccleery lab!

Our goals are to foster healthy populations and communities of wild animals and to advance the relationship between humans and the environment. Through research and teaching we provide regional and international leadership in mammalian conservation, global change ecology, and endangered species management.
​​"Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language." - Aldo Leopold

Lab news

August 2024
  • We (finally) say goodbye to the longest-tenured McCleery lab member (and webmaster), Alex, who has accepted a post-doctoral research position researching wild turkeys with Dr. Marcus Lashley. Good luck, Alex!
  • The McCleery lab welcomes three new members, Jose, Bryce, and Coral!
  • Storm successfully defended his thesis and earned his MS! Congratulations, Storm!

March 2024
  • Rebecca accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Biology at Mercer University and will start in the fall of 2024.
  • Alex was quoted in the Washington Post and National Geographic.
  • Rebecca completed fieldwork and will defend her dissertation in August 2024.
  • Rebecca was selected by the Florida Chapter of the Wildlife Society as the 2024 recipient of the Courtney A. Tye Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship.​

July 2023
  • ​Congratulations to Maggie and Alex, now Dr. Jones and Dr. Potash, on successfully defending their dissertations! You can watch Alex's exit seminar on our YouTube channel.
  • We welcome the newest McCleery Lab Member, Annabel Potash, who was born shortly after midnight to Friederike and Alex on Father's Day!

Recent publications

For access to all McCleery Lab publications, click here​
Bold names indicate current and former McCleery lab members 
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  • Boone, W. W., B. A. Bankovich, B. E. Reichert, M. B. Watson, and R. A. McCleery. 2024. Frequent prescribed burns reduce mammalian species richness and occurrence in longleaf pine sandhills. Forest Ecology and Management 553:121596 | PDF
  • Fletcher, R. J., A. O’Brien, T. F. Hall, M. Jones, A. D. Potash, L. Kruger, P. Simelane, K. Roques, A. Monadjem, and R. A. McCleery. 2023. Frightened of giants: fear responses to elephants approach that of predators. Biology Letters 19:20230202 | PDF
  • McCleery, R., R. Guralnick, M. Beatty, M. Belitz, C. J. Campbell, J. Idec, M. Jones, Y. Kang, A. Potash, and R. J. Fletcher. 2023. Uniting Experiments and Big Data to advance ecology and conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 38:970–979 | PDF
  • ​Potash, A. D., L. M. Conner, M. Clinchy, L. Y. Zanette, and R. A. McCleery. 2023. Prey species increase activity in refugia free of terrestrial predators. Oecologia 201:661–671 | PDF
  • Taillie, P. J., J. Hartfelder, A. Potash, D. Pienaar, C. Greaver, P. Viljoen, R. J. Fletcher, S. Ferreira, and R. A. McCleery. 2023. Hippos alter their aggregations to mitigate density‐dependent drought effects. Austral Ecology 48:969–982 | PDF