Paige Prentice
Paige grew up in the forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attended UC Santa Cruz for her undergraduate degrees. She fell in love with the desert after a winter conducting fieldwork in Death Valley National Park. In 2015, she was hired as the lead desert bighorn field biologist (Environmental Scientist) for CDFW’s Region 6.
Responsible for monitoring over fifty ranges with desert bighorn, Paige has developed a diverse range of skills including leading helicopter captures and surveys, tracking bighorn across rugged desert terrain, running field crews, and facilitating multiagency meetings. She believes collaborations are important for addressing questions regarding metapopulation dynamics, connectivity, genetic diversity, immunity, disease susceptibility, and population performance. Paige made the tough decision to leave CDFW in November 2021, but the good news is she’s pursuing her MS at OSU through the Epps Lab. She is still very passionate about the desert, bighorn, and questions regarding connectivity. Her research is part of larger disease ecology project interested in understanding the factors that drive variation between desert bighorn populations in the Mojave Desert. |