Scott Yanco is a Research Ecologist at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, Migratory Bird Center. His research focuses on studying individual animal to reveal the mechanisms that shape population dynamics, macroecological patterns, and evolution.

Yanco earned his B.A. in Biology from Colorado College and his Ph.D. in Integrative and Systems Biology from the University of Colorado Denver. He previously held postdoctoral positions at Yale University and the University of Michigan before joining the Smithsonian in 2024. Before and during graduate school, he spent more than a decade as a field biologist and environmental consultant, experience that informs a practical orientation toward his science.

His work has appeared in PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Current Biology, Ecology Letters, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and other leading journals, and has been covered by the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, and others. He serves as Associate Editor at Ornithology and holds leadership roles in the Movement Biodiversity Observation Network (MoveBON) and the International Bio-Logging Society.

Scott Yanco's research sits at the intersection of movement ecology, population biology, and macroecology. He is particularly interested in understanding how and why animals die, and what that reveals about how populations and ecosystems function. His lab uses diverse approaches including cutting edge bio-logging technologies, long-term field studies, theoretical models, big data synthesis, and advanced quantitative approaches to scale up individual-level data to address broader ecological questions.

One major thread of Yanco’s research concerns the interplay between animal movement, environmental conditions, and life history. His research has shown that seasonal resource dynamics constrain viable life histories across taxa, and that migratory behavior shapes how animals navigate fundamental ecological tradeoffs. A closely related thread is explicitly demographic: Yanco is pioneering methods to estimate demographic performance from animal tracking data, connecting behavior and fine-scale environmental variation to population vital rates in ways that were previously intractable, especially for small migratory species. Both of these research themes inform approaches to biodiversity conservation at global scales. Yanco advances this work through key partnership and participation in international initiatives such as the Animal Movement Biodiversity Observation Network where he is helping to lead work developing biodiversity indicators fusing high-resolution tracking data.