Rate My Professor Jonathan Armstrong

Jonathan Armstrong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University in the College of Agricultural Sciences. He earned a B.A. in Biology from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in 2005 and a Ph.D. from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2013. After completing his doctorate, Armstrong held a David H. Smith Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Wyoming in Laramie from 2013 to 2015. He joined Oregon State University as faculty, advancing to Associate Professor, where he advises graduate students in Fisheries and Wildlife and leads the Armstrong Research Group.

Armstrong's research integrates animal behavior, physiology, and landscape ecology to understand how fish and wildlife interact with their environments and how human activities modify these relationships. He employs observational studies, field experiments, and simulation modeling to explore how physical watershed features affect consumer energy budgets, population dynamics, and ecosystem services. His interests encompass predator-prey interactions, landscape-level foraging ecology, and behavioral thermoregulation, with studies on salmon runs, Kodiak brown bears, bull trout, redband trout, and ringtails. Notable publications include 'Excess digestive capacity in predators reflects a life of feast and famine' (Nature, 2011), 'Diel horizontal migration in streams: juvenile fish exploit spatial heterogeneity in thermal and trophic resources' (Ecology, 2013), 'Resource waves: phenological diversity enhances foraging opportunities for mobile consumers' (Ecology, 2016), 'Watershed complexity increases the capacity for salmon-wildlife interactions in coastal ecosystems' (Conservation Letters, 2020), and 'The importance of warm habitat to the growth regime of cold-water fishes' (Global Change Biology, 2021). Armstrong has garnered over 4,500 citations on Google Scholar and contributes to public outreach through wildlife photography, lectures, and media engagements on topics like salmon conservation and climate impacts on aquatic species.