about THE website
I built this website to showcase my work, offer resources for other wild carnivore biologists, and build future collaborations. If you are a young researcher with questions about how the work is done, or if you are interested in collaborating, feel to get in touch: LSerieys@panthera.org.
about me
At heart I’m a conservation biologist with a special interest in promoting the conservation of small wild cats through research and education (see my CV). As of February 2021, I have worked for Panthera as a Conservation Scientist with the Small Cats Program. Before joining Panthera, I worked on four different small cat projects, and I coordinated and led 3 of those. Although I’ve always been interested to work with carnivores, and wild cats in particular, it took me a while to get my foot in the door. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, USA and graduated with a degree in zoology from the University of Texas, Austin in 2003.
My introduction to the world of wild cat research was a National Park Service internship in Los Angeles, California, USA in 2006. There I worked on an urban bobcat and mountain lion study, and carried the work into my PhD research at the University of California, Los Angeles graduate program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (2006-2014). My Ph.D. research focused on how urbanization and pesticides drives genetic change and disease susceptibility in urban bobcats. I next conceived the Urban Caracal Project in in 2013 and took a gamble to travel to South Africa to coordinate the effort. In Cape Town I have collected spatial and genetic data from caracals in the Cape Peninsula isolated by the City of Cape Town. With these data, I am examining caracal behavioral response to urbanization. The project has been more successful than I could have anticipated and I am fortunate to call Cape Town my “home-base” for now. But between 2017-2019, I split my time between 2 post-doctoral positions– the caracal project in Cape Town, and the San Jose bobcat project through Dr. Chris Wilmers’ lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In San Jose, our goal was to generate an immensely detailed bobcat movement dataset over the course of 18-months that would guide land acquisition and habitat restoration in one of the last natural wildlife linkages across the 101-freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area. My challenge for that study was to learn how to manage 5-minute GPS-movement data for 36 bobcats (paper in prep!). Most recently, I had the opportunity to formalize my role on the Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project in Sri Lanka as graduate co-supervisor and mentor. I have traveled to Colombo multiple times to assist graduate student Anya Ratnayaka with her inspiring work on hyper-urban fishing cats and to help train her teams.
Among some of the achievements I am most proud of are the conservation outcomes my work has already achieved. In California, in partnership with Raptors Are The Solution, Poison Free Malibu, and numerous other researchers in the field, we are pushing for legislative changes regarding the consumer availability of common anticoagulant rat poisons that pose great ecological risk to wildlife. As a graduate student in Los Angeles, I collaborated with the National Park Service on their urban mountain lion project which has grown into a movement to build a wildlife corridor across one of the busiest freeways in the U.S. In Cape Town, I am working to prepare a management plan for caracals in the isolated Cape Peninsula, increasingly impacted by urbanization. I am especially proud of the University of Cape Town students that are contributing to the caracal work.
Presently, as a Conservation Scientist with Panthera, I have the fortune to work on numerous small cats projects within the organization, and to continue publishing my data that I collected on the Urban Caracal Project.