Allison Huysman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and a research fellow with the Smithsonian’s Virginia Working Landscapes. She is interested in the trophic interactions and movement ecology of birds in working landscapes.

Prior to her current role, Huysman was an intern, and later staff member, for the Migratory Bird Center. She contributed to the Migratory Connectivity Project and the Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds.

Huysman received her master’s degree from Humboldt State University in 2019, where she studied barn owl response to wildfires in Napa, California, vineyards. This research was part of a larger project to determine if placing nest boxes in vineyards to attract barn owls could be an effective means of rodent pest control. Huysman studied barn owl behavior by monitoring nest boxes throughout Napa Valley and by deploying GPS tags to determine what land-cover types the barn owls use to hunt.