About Me
Hello! My name is Amber, and I am a quantitative ecologist, interested in developing scalable and efficient methods to monitor biodiversity and human–wildlife interactions. My current research is based in the Cairngorms Connect landscape, Scotland’s largest habitat restoration project. I am a current PhD student at the Centre for Research into Environmental and Ecological Modelling (CREEM) at the University of St Andrews.
Research Interests
- Hierarchical modelling of ecological and environmental data
- Machine learning for wildlife monitoring
- Quantitative social science
- Conservation technology
- Camera trapping
- Passive acoustic monitoring
📸 Refresh page for more camera trap images!
Teaching & Training
- At the University of St Andrews, I teach on two courses in the Statistical Ecology MSc programme: Applied Statistical Modelling using GLMs and Advanced Data Analysis .
- I have developed workshops on "Statistics in R" and "Applied Hierarchical Modelling of Species Distribution and Abundance" taught at the Lajuma Research Centre, South Africa and the International Wildlife Congress 2025, Norway.
Publications & Projects
The best place to see my recent research is on ResearchGate and ORCID.
- Cowans, A., Lambin, X., Hare, D., & Sutherland, C. (2024). Improving the integration of artificial intelligence into existing ecological inference workflows. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. [Read article]
- Cowans, A., Bigatà, A. B., & Sutherland, C. (2025). Sample size considerations for species co‐occurrence models. Ecology, 106(8), e70175. [Read article]
- Sutherland, C., Cowans, A., Reilly, H., & Lamont, W. (2025). Towards transparent reporting of deer cull targets in Scotland – the Deer Population Projection Tool. NatureScot Technical Reports. [Read article]
- Cowans, A. (2025). AI: a new paradigm of inference? AI & SOCIETY [Read article]
Contact
📧 ajpc1@st-andrews.ac.uk
🏛️ CREEM, University of St Andrews
💻 GitHub: AC-ecology