Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey
Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey is an aquatic landscape ecologist with more than 15 years of Federal, State, and educational natural resource experience. Jeremiah began his aquatic career working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife as a biologist where he surveyed hundreds of miles of streams and riparian and upslope areas documenting aquatic and terrestrial habitats and analyzing fish abundance, distribution and behavior. Later, Jeremiah worked with the US Forest Service as a fish and wildlife biologist where he gained invaluable natural resource experience on the Federal side of things. While working for the USFS, Jeremiah gained diverse experience working with a variety of wildlife species/habitats that ultimately helped shape his understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. After college, Jeremiah approached natural resources from the consulting angle which eventually brought him to the Conservation Biology Institute in 2009.
Jeremiah earned an undergraduate Honors degree (with distinction) with a focus in Statistical Ecology from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University (OSU; Corvallis, Oregon). For his undergraduate Honors thesis, he examined historical patterns of skeletal deformities in fishes of the Columbia River basin. Also while an undergraduate, Jeremiah teamed with the Rickreall Watershed Council to 1) identify the ichthyofauna in Rickreall Creek, and 2) raise community awareness and pride in the watershed and of its aquatic inhabitants. For his work with this project, Jeremiah and the rest of his team were given a “Significant Science Contributions” award by Polk County and the Rickreall Watershed Council. Concurrent with this work, Jeremiah was also awarded multiple grants to study the effects of coastal oceanographic patterns and bathymetry on larval dispersal and feeding behaviors of intertidal tidepool sculpins. He conducted these studies with another research assistant and a post-doctoral research fellow while working with the Partnership for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans ( PISCO ), a long-term ecosystem research and monitoring program led by scientists from four universities.
Jeremiah earned his Masters in Fisheries Science from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU with a focus in Quantitative Fish Ecology. His Masters thesis research focused on physiological and behavioral interactions between introduced (and invasive) and native fish species in the Great Basin physiogeographic province of the southwestern United States. This research took Jeremiah throughout the mountain ranges of north-central Nevada and southeastern Oregon where Jeremiah PIT-tagged (with Passive Integrated Transponders) and tracked thousands of Lahontan cutthroat trout and eastern brook charr (which are often incorrectly referred to as trout) over multiple years to determine growth, behavior and survival.
Jeremiah’s recent work includes 1) a variety of watershed analyses and biological assessments, 2) modeling riparian stand dynamics and their influence on instream large wood, stream morphology and fish habitat, 3) examining mining influences on terrestrial and aquatic species, and 4) developing models linking climate change, hydrology and aquatic biological integrity.
While Jeremiah’s research has focused primarily on fish and aquatic communities, he has worked with a variety of organisms including amphibians, mollusks, ungulates, cougar and lynx, owls, songbirds, voles, plants and fungi. Consequently, he has conducted research in a variety of systems including terrestrial, aquatic (freshwater, marine, estuarine), arboreal, desert, sagebrush steppe, subalpine, coastal and montane, and with ubiquitous, sensitive, native and introduced species.
His experience includes aquatic and terrestrial species habitat survey and inventory, invasive-species monitoring, natural resource impact analyses, public outreach awareness projects, stream restoration, road/culvert planning, design and implementation, geographic information systems (GIS) and publication in peer-reviewed journals.
Jeremiah’s interests are diverse and include statistics, ecology, behavioral interactions, community structure, impacts of introduced species, and the interplay between humans and the rest of the natural world. Personally, Jeremiah enjoys spending time with his family, friends and animals. Favored activities include backpacking, fishing, hunting, SCUBA diving, traveling, reading, gardening and homebrewing.
