| I am interested in understanding how our natural plant
communities are maintained, or conversely degraded. Oak
woodlands, ponderosa pine forests, grasslands and other plant
communities define our sense of place and ‘home’ and provide
countless natural services for us. Plant herbivore interactions
and invasive species can dramatically alter these plant
communities. As an ecologist and conservationist I seek to
provide management guidance that will maintain our natural plant
communities in spite of threats due to overgrazing or invasive
species. The management of natural areas to maintain both
biodiversity and community types requires a continuous
compromise between management interventions at the local scale
and ecological and evolutionary processes that occur over large
spatial and long temporal scales. My research is predominately
field experimental, but currently I am developing a database of
the native and naturalized exotic California flora to correlate
combinations of traits such as longevity, adult and seed size
with native plant community resilience and exotic invasiveness.
This combined field and database approach seeks to reconcile
large scale processes with the often incremental impacts on
local communities that determine conservation and restoration
actions at the site level. I believe that combined approaches are important in teaching as
well. I will offer Introduction to Environmental Science (ENVS
1) and US Environmental Policy (ENVS 122). Environmental science
and conservation are distinctly interdisciplinary and we are
obliged to understand the social, economic, and geopolitical
realities that test the feasibility of purely scientific
recommendations. In designing exercises and lectures, I try to
promote discussion by deconstructing popular (or unpopular)
views of nature and environmental ethics. In this way, I hope to
encourage critical thinking by identifying our own biases to
better understand an entire range of opinions.
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