Lisa, Shasta and Marek are graduating!

Three of our PhD students are moving on this year to greater things. See shots of them in action (and some of their field sites and work) above. Each came to Cal with different skills and interests, and each will leave with new insights into how California's social-ecological systems function. Each addresses a changing natural system under some scale of management. Their work collectively spans nearly the breadth of California's landscapes: wetlands, forest and rangelands; and individually, each has developed novel methods for analyzing geospatial, ecological and survey data. Lisa Schile's dissertation Tidal wetland vegetation in the San Francisco Bay Estuary: modeling species distribution with sea-level rise looks at the changes our SF Bay marshes will likely face in this century through rigorous field experimentation, remote sensing and spatial modeling. Shasta Ferranto's dissertation Private Lands, Public Goods: Engaging Landowners in Ecosystem Management uses survey methods and statistical clustering to examine how the patchwork of owners of Californian forests and rangeland have many different motivations for owning and managing land, and asks what this might mean for large-scale ecosystem management. Shasta's papers are here.  Marek Jakubowski's dissertation Using LiDAR in wildfire ecology of the California Sierra-Nevada forests shows how lidar technology and geospatial data and analysis can be an integrator across environemental science, adding power and detail to analyses of fire, wildlife habitat, and canopy structure. They've taught us all much, and it will be sad to see them leave. Stay in touch!