MSU Faculty Member to be Honored for Outstanding Paper

Lance McNew, a new faculty member in the Department of Animal and Range Sciences at Montana State University, will be honored Oct. 26 in Pittsburgh at the 21st annual conference of The Wildlife Society.

McNew was lead author of a scientific article selected as the 2014 outstanding article in wildlife publications. It ran in the Journal of Wildlife Management and described findings about greater prairie-chickens, an indicator species for tallgrass prairie in North America.

The Wildlife Society publishes more than 200 articles each year in its three peer-reviewed wildlife ecology journals. It then selects one of those as the year’s outstanding article. The article must show originality of research or thought and a high scholastic standard in presentation. The article must have been published within the last three years.

McNew wrote his article with three co-authors from Kansas State University. The paper, titled “Demography of Greater Prairie-Chickens: Regional Variation in Vital Rates, Sensitivity Values, and Population Dynamics,” summarized a four-year study in east-central Kansas. The research is complete, McNew said, but the team is finishing up some analyses this fall.

The paper being honored was part of his doctoral research at Kansas State University, where he was a Ph.D. student from 2006 to 2010 and postdoctoral researcher from 2010 to 2012, McNew said. He was notified about the award in August when he was working at the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Science Center. He worked for the USGS from 2012 until this August, when he came to MSU. His research interests at MSU involve wildlife habitat ecology with a focus on improving the functionality of wildlife habitats in agricultural systems.