William DeLuca

Bill DeLuca is the Senior Manager of Migration Ecology at the National Audubon Society. He works as part of the Migratory Bird Initiative where he focuses on using full life cycle information to prioritize locations for conservation across the Western Hemisphere. Bill is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Before joining Audubon, as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts and the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, Bill was a principal member of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes Project where he developed species distribution models to inform a landscape conservation design for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, called Nature’s Network. Bill’s other research focuses on the full life cycle ecology of blackpoll warblers and understanding the consequences of climate change for montane birds of the northeastern U.S. All of Bill’s professional efforts are motivated by a desire to apply rigorous science to inform policy and effect decision making to conserve biodiversity.

Bill received his bachelor’s degree from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and went on to earn an M.S. in Biology at George Mason University in Farifax, VA. There he worked closely with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center to understand the effects of watershed land use on Chesapeake Bay bird communities. Bill received a Ph.D. in Wildlife Conservation from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied the effects of climate change on New Hampshire’s mountain bird communities.