Last updated: December 20, 2024
Article
Scientist Profile: Lauren Youngblood, Vegetation Ecologist
NPS/Daw
Lauren Youngblood grew up running around the woods in southeastern Pennsylvania—flipping logs, digging holes, and catching tadpoles in creeks. She always knew she wanted to be a biologist, dreaming of life as a marine biologist/photojournalist in a second-grade writing assignment. And indeed, her innate curiosity for the complexity of nature has opened interesting doors of biological inquiry. From studying lizards and their thermal environments, to exploring how habitat structure can influence animal behavior, to examining how plant communities may respond to wildfires, her research has always centered on the dynamic interactions between organisms and their changing environments. As ecologist and vegetation program lead at the Klamath Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Network in Oregon since 2023, with access to long-term monitoring data, she’s now able to ask even larger scale questions about complex phenomena.
“What fascinates me most about ecology is how everything is connected—plants, animals, climate, and even the tiniest details in a habitat. It’s in the way a cold lizard seeks out a warm rock, or how a tiny seedling leans toward a sunlit gap in a dense canopy. Long-term monitoring data lets us see how those connections play out over time.”
Youngblood
Early Career Experiences
Her first exciting realization that people could have careers in ecology came while attending an undergraduate study abroad program in Costa Rica with the Organization of Tropical Studies. Moving around to different research stations, she worked on a mix of plant and animal projects. One memorable study tested whether tadpoles vibrated less in the presence of predators like spiders!
Her master’s degree research at Georgia Southern University focused on how thermal microclimates influenced lizard behavior and physiology. This research had a practical application because she was studying how the Florida scrub lizard (Sceloporus woodi) responded to clear cut forest logging vs. prescribed burns. She found that the different habitat structures resulting from each management regime created different microclimates, and these microclimates influenced lizard activity times.
Her PhD work at Arizona State University took this area of study a step further. She used a combination of fieldwork, lab experiments, and modeling to explore how thermal environments and habitat heterogeneity shape the energetic costs of an animal occurring in a particular environment.
NPS
Job Highlights
Youngblood leads three vegetation monitoring programs for the network: plant communities, invasive species, and whitebark pine. Layered onto these projects, she’s also looking at bigger questions to answer. The common thread of her interests has always been understanding how organisms and populations respond to changes in their environment. As vegetation ecologist with the network, she can now explore this kind of question at a much larger scale, examining the effects of climate change on plant communities, including the spread of invasive species. She’s collaborating with USGS partners to do exactly this: modeling the potential spread of invasive plants in network parks based on long-term monitoring data and climate projections.
In addition to collecting monitoring data and exploring the effects of climate on plant communities, Youngblood also finds several other aspects of her current job exciting. She enjoys helping park managers address resource problems that might arise unexpectedly. For example, this past summer when the Park Fire in northern California surged unpredictably towards Lassen Volcanic National Park, she created maps of high-value whitebark pine stands for potential protection from the fire. She’s also been developing data visualizers for natural resource vital signs monitored in each park to provide managers with data in a very usable format.
Youngblood also loves the fieldwork. Steep, muddy riparian plots in Redwood National and State Parks make for an exhausting day of hauling transect equipment around, but those challenges are offset by the glorious scenery in whitebark pine plots at tree-line on the slopes of Lassen Volcanic National Park. For the more challenging plots, two essential tools of the trade for Youngblood are Tecnu lotion for poison oak and dark chocolate Reese’s peanut butter cups!
Youngblood
Reflections
Reflecting on the value of long-term monitoring in parks, Youngblood is most excited about predictive models. She sees tremendous possibility in models based on monitoring data that can connect environmental drivers, like climate, to changing resource conditions. By predicting changes in biodiversity, these models will be crucial for park management in a rapidly changing climate.
Fun
For fun, Youngblood enjoys hiking and traveling with her husband, Jake, and playing with their adorable cat, Ava. On the weekends, Youngblood enjoys acrylic painting, which she orchestrates by turning a nook in her kitchen into an art studio.
Article by Sonya Daw, Klamath Inventory and Monitoring Network
Adapted from The Klamath Kaleidoscope newsletter, Fall-Winter 2024 issue