R. Bruce Bury

R. Bruce Bury (born November 22, 1942 in Roseburg, Oregon), a pioneer in the study of herpetofauna (amphibians and reptiles),^[1] is an American conservationist, herpetologist, and natural historian and Scientist Emeritus of the United States Geological Survey.^[2] Bury, C. Kenneth Dodd, Jr. and Gary Fellers were the first to suggest widespread amphibian declines were progressing.^[3] In 1972, Bury became the first person hired by the United States Department of the Interior under the specific title of Herpetologist.^[4] In 2009, the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) made Bury the 11th herpetologist awarded the annual Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology.^[5] Bury is a founding governing board member and executive editor of the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology.

Education and research

For more than 30 years, Bury has studied herpetofauna ecology and conservation, including the effects of invasive species and wildfire on populations. Thanks in part to his efforts, herpetofauna are recognized as important indicators of ecosystem health.^[1] After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 (his PHD advisor was Robert C. Stebbins^[6]), R. Bruce Bury was hired as a Research Zoologist and Chief of the new Herpetology Section. He functioned a curator of the North American collection and worked with the listing of endangered species, identified herpetofauna for the U.S. Fish and WIldife Division of Law Enforcement, and developed an active program of field research. In 1978/79, Bury moved from the office in the USNM to a new field station in Fort Collins, Colorado. In the 1970s and 1980s, he conducted field work throughout the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, Mexico and on National Wildlife Refuges in Florida, Texas, Nebraska, Colorado, Washington. Bury and his team pursued studies in three major arenas, all in the western United States: The effects of off-road vehicles on desert herpetofaunas (Busack and Bury 1974; Bury et al. 1977), Agassiz’s Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) biology (Medica et al. 1975), and the ecology of herpetofauna in the Pacific Northwest (Bury 1973; Bury and Martin 1973). He had continued his off-road vehicle studies (Bury 1980; Bury and Luckenbach 1983; Luckenbach and Bury 1983) and his investigations of Agassiz’s Desert Tortoises took on new life, culminating in a comprehensive edited volume on the tortoises of North America (Bury 1982). Long before the current awareness of the problems facing amphibian populations, Bruce and two Interior colleagues, Gary Fellers and Ken Dodd, published a detailed review of the conservation needs of the amphibians of the United States (Bury et al. 1980). In 1979, He and P. Stephen Corn worked on the ecology and status of small mammals, frogs, and salamanders in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. This association has been extremely productive (Bury 1983; Bury and Corn 1988a,b, 1995; Corn 1994a, b, c, d; Corn and Bury 1986, 1989, 1991a, b; Corn and Vertucci 1992). They also collaborated on Agassiz’s Desert Tortoise studies (Bury and Corn 1995). As a necessary part of their investigations they developed methods of studying these difficult subjects (Bury and Corn 1987, 1991; Bury and Raphael 1983; Corn and Bury 1990). On the side, Bruce continued to work with the Western Pond Turtle, Actinemys marmorata (see Bury and Wolfheim 1973; Bury 1986). Bruce Bury moved to the NBS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center (FRESC) in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1993. He continues to publish the results of former and present projects, with a major research focus on the effects of logging, fire, and other perturbations on amphibians of the Northwest forests (Bury 1994, 1997, 2004, 2008; Olson et al. 1997; Adams et al. 1998, 2001; Palen et al. 2002; Pearl et al. 2009), especially plethodontid salamanders and stream amphibians (Bury and Adams 1999). Further, he continues writing about Agassiz’s Desert Tortoise (Bury and Corn 1995; Bury and Luckenbach 2002) and has produced another edited volume on North American tortoises (Bury and Germano 1994) and the Western Pond Turtles (Bury and Germano 1998; Germano and Bury 1998; Germano and Bury 2009; Bury et al. 2010). (The above section is consolidated from ^[4] The annual meeting of the Society of Northwestern Vertebrate Biology and the Washington Chapter of the Wildlife Society held a day-long symposium honoring his legacy to herpetology.^[1]

References

External links

• Bruce Bury's Profile at USGS