Faculty Profile

Kevin Crooks

August 2009

As homes, businesses and roads continue to expand and urban sprawl grows in Colorado and across the nation, Colorado State University Associate Professor Kevin Crooks in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation Biology focuses his current research on wildlife behavior and conservation at the wildland-urban interface.

Crooks’s scientific research addresses the pressing wildlife conservation and sustainability issues confronting Colorado citizens along the Front Range, as well as in other areas of the nation experiencing rapid urban growth.

Using a variety of scientific techniques, including field observations, laboratory experimentation, computer modeling and human dimension surveys, Crooks examines the compelling impacts of anthropogenic disturbances on natural system caused by urban sprawl and habitat fragmentation. He has studied a wide variety of species including prairie dogs, bobcats, pumas, skunks and foxes.

Among his many externally funded research grants, his most noteworthy is his five-year National Science Foundation grant of $2.3 million through the Ecology of Infectious Disease program to investigate the effects of urban fragmentation on disease dynamics in wild cats.

Bobcats and pumas often share overlapping habitats and are susceptible to many of the same diseases and are at risk of infection with some domestic cat pathogens. Hundreds of outdoor domestic cats roam around urban edges with some access to adjacent natural areas, potentially coming into contact with wild cats. As part of the NSF grant, Crooks and his colleagues are studying to what extent disease agents in puma and bobcat populations are found in domestic cats. Some of these diseases, such as toxoplasmosis and bartonella, or cat scratch disease, can also infect humans.

In another recent research project, Crooks worked with the U.S. Geological Survey and The Nature Conservancy to examine how and where wild bobcats were moving in Southern California by tracking their movements across the landscape with global positioning satellite, or GPS, collars.

As Southern California's Orange County continues to grow, wildlife habitat keeps shrinking. Crooks and his collaborators studied the effects of urbanization on bobcats. They were particularly interested in learning if bobcats favor certain wildlife corridors and identifying popular paths in which bobcats cross beneath busy roads and highways. Results revealed that bobcats are living closer to urban communities than previously thought and are exposed to a variety of mortality risks, including being hit by cars.

"My research has revealed that bobcat populations decline and disappear as landscapes become increasingly fragmented, which happens when habitat fragments immersed within urban areas become too small or too isolated," said Crooks.

Crooks received his doctorate in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and obtained his undergraduate degree in zoology from Colorado State University.