Kristine O. Evans

Email: kristine.evans@msstate.edu

Kristine is an Assistant Professor of Conservation Biology in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at Mississippi State. Her interests broadly focus on species-habitat interactions in important Southeastern ecosystems. This includes work in native prairies, coastal beaches and dunes, open pine systems, managed pine systems, estuaries and marshlands, and bottomland hardwood systems. Her disciplinary interests include landscape ecology, avian ecology, agro-ecology, applied conservation biology, at-risk species, species distribution modeling, standardized population monitoring, large-scale conservation planning and behavioral ecology.

She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in landscape ecology, animal behavior, conservation biology, and communications. Kristine is a native of Toledo, OH and had a passion for wildlife conservation, particularly birds, since a very young age. She obtained her B.S. from Ohio University in 2000, then went on to study sampling methodologies and population genetics in northern bobwhite as part of her M.S. work at Mississippi State University, graduating in 2004. After some time working on an oil spill recovery team in Delaware and living in Appalachian North Carolina she returned to Mississippi State to coordinate a national monitoring program for bobwhite and grassland birds, earning her Ph.D. in 2012.

She then went on to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of a regional inventory and monitoring team for the National Wildlife Refuge system, then worked at geomatics coordinator for the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks Landscape Conservation Cooperative based out of the Geosystems Research Institute at Mississippi State. She returned to the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture in 2017 to help launch the Conservation Biology concentration in the department. In her spare time, she enjoys spending as much time as possible outdoors with her family, traveling, attending sporting events, writing and painting.