Hila Shamon

Hila Shamon is a wildlife ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Conservation Ecology Center. Shamon’s research interests focus on anthropogenic activity and land-use change effects on terrestrial mammals’ distribution and densities across large landscape gradients. Shamon uses a multi-species, multi-trophic approach to answer local- and landscape-level questions that unveil mechanistic processes and cascading processes, combining several modeling methodologies, and collects data from the field using camera traps, audio recordings, GPS tags and aerial imagery.

Stories from this author

In the midst of the pandemic, as the story goes, a team set out to bring swift foxes back to a land they had disappeared from more than 50 years ago.

How Tribes and Conservation Partners are Bringing Swift Foxes Back to Their Historic Range

In the midst of the pandemic, as the story goes, a team set out to bring swift foxes back to a land they had disappeared from more than 50 years ago.

A bison crosses a coulee (a landform shaped by water drainage) during a freezing spring morning.

Studying Animals in Extreme Landscapes

We know that animals select where to live based on their needs — such as food, shelter or safe passage — and their preferences change throughout the year. I want to understand why large mammals choose some areas over others, and how human interaction affects their activity and distribution.