Adjunct & Affiliated Faculty

Biography, Education and Training

Dr. M. Tim Tinker is a consulting Research Wildlife Biologist with Nhydra Ecological Research, and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He also holds adjunct appointments at Dalhousie University and University of Victoria. Since 1993 he has been studying sea otter populations and their roles as top predators in California, Alaska, British Columbia and the Russian Commander Islands.  Dr. Tinker was previously the project leader for the USGS coastal ecology field station in Santa Cruz, California, in which he designed and oversaw a long-term, multi-agency study investigating the factors limiting the recovery of threatened populations of sea otters, and he continues to work closely with USGS, UC Santa Cruz and other agencies and institutions on sea otter conservation research. More broadly, Dr. Tinker’s work focuses on the ecology of coastal marine communities, particularly the suite of direct and indirect interactions between sea otters and other species in the near-shore environment (including humans) and the effects of these interactions on ecosystem structure and function. Dr. Tinker utilizes various quantitative modeling approaches to integrate diverse data sets, exploring how individual-level processes (e.g. physiology, behavior) translate into population-level dynamics (recovery, decline, re-distribution), which in turn can affect food web structure and ecosystem health.