Dr Bethany R Smith

Postdoctoral Research Assistant, ZSL

Beth’s research focuses on the use of decision science to aid small population recovery, and non-invasive monitoring to facilitate coexistence between people and wildlife.

Currently, Beth is employing structured decision-making (SDM) to help develop a national recovery strategy for red squirrels in England.

Beth is also interested in the use of non-invasive methods to monitor wildlife and how these tools can be used to facilitate coexistence between people and wildlife. For her PhD, Beth studied the interactions between livestock guarding dogs and wildlife in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains through interviews with shepherds, scat analyses, GPS tracking, and camera trapping. Prior to this she conducted her master’s research on 1) using camera traps to study the responses of brown bears to human disturbance in Croatia, and 2) developing an eDNA assay to detect water vole and American mink presence in water samples. 

Beth also conducts research within an independent group called the Bioacoustics Research Group. This groups focuses on passive acoustic monitoring and acoustic localisation of wildlife including wolves, coyotes, golden jackals, Cao vit gibbons, and tigers.