Maddie Tango

Maddie Tango is a senior at Middlebury College studying Conservation Biology and Geography/GIS. Over the 2020-2021 academic year, Maddie completed a senior thesis reproducing a study modelling the impacts of landscape ecology on fatality of bats caused by wind turbines in eastern United States. Maddie studied the authors’ methods, reproduced them with QGIS graphic models and R scripts, and learned everything there is to know about bat ecology, fatality estimators, and meta-analyses in ecology. She found that we need much more transparent and standardized methods for surveying bat and bird fatalities at windmill sites in order to conduct robust enough meta-analyses to inform conservation and energy policy.

The thesis has been published in the Middlebury Archives:

Tango, M. (2021). Reproducibility of a Geographical Study on the Effects of Wind Turbines on Bat Fatalities in the Northeast United States. Available at: https://repository.middlebury.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A2202

Maddie presented her thesis work at the 2021 Middlebury College Spring Symposium, at the Society for Conservation GIS 2021 Virtual Conference and the 14th Wind Wildlife Research Meeting in November 2022!

Learn more about Maddie and her work on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Congratulations to Maddie on graduation in February 2022 and on her new job at the Environmental Protection Agency in San Diego!