Scott A. Bonar Lab
AZ Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit

Scott Bonar is a Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Arizona and Leader of the USGS Arizona Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. He has conducted award-winning natural resources work in natural resources programs of state and federal government, universities, and private industry for over twenty-five years, authoring over 100 publications and supervising over eighty employees. His unit won the highest award in the nation for relations with cooperators, and science respectively. He holds a B.S. degree in Science Education from the University of Evansville and a Ph.D. in Fisheries Science from the University of Washington.

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Dr. Bonar's fisheries work focuses on management and biology of fishes in the Western United States. He and his students have conducted research on fish-habitat relationships, interactions between native and nonnative fishes, rare fish propagation and fish diseases. He led over 250 biologists from 107 agencies, universities and private organizations to standardize freshwater fisheries monitoring in North America, the first time this has been done on such a large scale in history. He was president of the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society, and has spoken to a diverse array of groups both nationally and internationally, most notably, the NATO Environmental Security Council in Brussels, Belgium, and international fisheries conferences in North America and Europe. Dr. Bonar is familiar with a wide variety of aquatic ecosystems. He grew up in the large river and cypress swamp country of Southwestern Indiana and Kentucky; and studied and worked in the Puget Sound region of western Washington before moving to the deserts of the American Southwest.