El Chambi

El Chambi is a wildlife biologist specializing in wolf eco-ethology, exploring how wolves adapt to human-dominated landscapes and how those adaptations shape human tolerance. His work integrates behavioral ecology, conservation behavior theory, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to understand the decisions wolves make when navigating contested spaces where wilderness meets working lands, and coexistence is fragile, and how these decisions impact their environment as well as the humans who share spaces with them.

Building on a foundation of field research and community engagement, his graduate work will focus on Oregon’s wolves and the fine-scale behavioral adaptations that emerge under human presence. This includes examining how individual wolves learn to navigate deterrents, livestock pastures, and human infrastructure; how social groups maintain or lose cohesion under pressure; and how behavioral visibility, daylight movement, proximity to settlements, or vocal presence, influences human tolerance.

His research seeks to illuminate the two-way feedback loops between wolf behavior and human perception, aiming to inform coexistence strategies that move beyond reactive conflict mitigation toward predictive, relationship-based approaches that respect both ecological integrity and community needs.

A graduate of Oregon State University’s Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences program (Magna Cum Laude), he brings a vision of conservation rooted in reciprocity, trust, and adaptive learning. For him, conservation is as more about relationships than it is about numbers. It's about memory, adaptation, and respect across species lines.

Wolves have been both subject and teacher, revealing lessons in resilience, empathy, and the shared ethics of living in a world where boundaries, ecological or political, are never fixed.