Addison G. Allen
Addison graduated with her Masters degree from the Lanier Lab in 2021. Addison’s research focused on the role of forest fires in shaping the small mammal community in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. She used isotope analysis of hairs from museum study skins to study the dietary contributions of carbon and nitrogen in the diets of the two regionally dominant small mammal species (the red-backed vole Myodes gapperi and the deermouse Peromyscus maniculatus) throughout different fire succession stages. Overall, Addison is interested in the ecological effects of competition (using isotopic niche spaces) and resource availability to understand the dynamics of change in small mammal communities.
Addison got her start in science as an undergraduate assistant in the mammalogy department, where she first became interested in research. During that time, she went on collection trips with the mammalogy department investigating the geographic range of the Texas kangaroo rat in the desert scrub of southwest Oklahoma, where it was last spotted in 1969. During those years, Addison worked in multiple positions at the museum, and she was alsoinvolved in herpetology and entomology collection trips while she continued working in the mammalogy department. Addison joined the Lanier Lab as an undergraduate researcher in the fall of 2017, working on a project in Yellowstone focused on fire-related shifts in deermice (Peromyscus maniculatus), a species resilient to ecological disturbance. Work on grids initially established after the 1988 Yellowstone fires have provided a long-term dataset on post-fire succession in ecosystem ecology, including data on small mammal and invertebrate communities along with microhabitats and vegetation. She participate in the 2018 field season in Yellowstone and became a Masters student in Fall 2018, continuing her research. In 2020 she was awarded an honorable mention for the NSG Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
