Creating science-based strategies to preserve saguaros and other iconic desert species impacted by climate change
Saguaro National Park
The creation of science-based strategies to preserve iconic plants associated with national parks, with a focus on saguaros in Saguaro National Park. The Fellow will determine the specific response of saguaros to changing environmental conditions and develop a geographically-based climate action plan to protect the plant over the next two centuries.
Dr. Lea Richardson
Dr. Lea K. Richardson is an ecologist broadly interested in understanding how environmental change impacts long-lived species and their surrounding ecological communities. Lea completed their PhD from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden studying the effect of fire and reproductive timing on pollination and fitness of long-lived herbaceous plants of the tallgrass prairies of the United States. Most recently, Lea has been a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Joshua Tree Genome Project. By discovering how Joshua Tree genomes have locally adapted to climate, Lea hopes to contribute to science-informed conservation and management of keystone desert species. Before pursuing a PhD, Lea was a public high school teacher in Los Angeles, California. As a scientist and educator, Lea aims to sow the seeds for a cultural shift to support the conservation of biodiversity and science literacy; inspiring people to develop deeper personal connections to non-human organisms, and carving out new spaces for and integration of knowledge between experts and the public.
The resilience and vulnerability of Arctic rivers to permafrost thaw and emergent environmental toxicity
Arctic Inventory & Monitoring Network
Climate change is dramatically altering Arctic ecosystems. In recent years, more than 70 pristine clearwater streams have turned orange across Alaska’s Arctic national parks. The Fellow will help investigate the causes and consequences of this emergent phenomenon.
Dr. Rebecca Frei is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Davis in the Department of Ecotoxicology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, where she was awarded Canada’s premier Vanier Graduate Scholarship for her dissertation on water quality impacts from northern peatland disturbance. Her research interests include the hydro-biogeochemical mechanisms controlling the fate of carbon, nutrients, and metals along the terrestrial-aquatic continuum in northern watersheds. She has completed a postdoc at Idaho State University, studying water transit time and solute transport in Arctic permafrost hillslopes. Currently, Dr. Frei is investigating how emergent acid rock drainage from thawing permafrost affects in-stream carbon and nutrient dynamics. She collaborates with an interdisciplinary group of scientists across agencies to understand the spatial and temporal extent of water quality impairment from acid rock drainage in Alaska’s Brooks Range, assessing the risk to aquatic ecosystems and northern communities.
Conserving Northwest forests at risk from emerging threats
Mount Rainier National Park, Olympic National Park, North Cascades National Park, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, San Juan Island National Historical Park, North Coast and Cascades Inventory & Monitoring Network
Pacific Northwest parks need cutting edge, landscape scale monitoring tools to conserve and manage ancient forests and multi-aged stands from the coast to the Cascades. The Fellow will draw from existing data and resources to develop novel tools to improve forest age maps, identify emerging issues in forest health and model climate vulnerabilities.
Dr. James Lamping holds a master's degree in Forestry, Fire, and Rangeland Management from Cal Poly Humboldt and recently earned his PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on using field-based measurements, remote sensing tools, and process-based models to understand current aspects of a forests structure and their future vulnerabilities. Dr. Lamping’s dissertation provided high-resolution and spatially complete estimates of forest structure and composition in North America's temperate rainforests while also projecting their future carbon trajectories under climate change and management scenarios using LANDIS-II. Building on his work in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia, Dr. Lamping will collaborate with National Parks personnel to enhance our understanding of potential future vulnerabilities in the Pacific Northwest's National Parks.
The role of peat accumulation in conserving tropical mangroves in the face of climate change
Biscayne National Park
An understanding is needed of local mechanisms supporting peat development in mangroves, the effect of management actions, and identifying areas showing the greatest change relative to land use activities. The Fellow will link changes in mangrove distribution to variation in peat development mechanisms and soil elevation across Biscayne Bay.
Dr. Elena Solohin has a PhD in environmental science from Indiana University Bloomington. She is broadly driven by research questions at the forefront of the interaction between natural and human systems in the context of climate change and adaptation to environmental change. Using field measurements and remote sensing, she studies coastal wetlands' responses to sea level rise, land use changes, and human disturbances. Her work has spanned South Florida (Everglades National Park), the Louisiana coast, the Atlantic Southeast Coast (Carolinas and Georgia), and Lake Erie in Northwest Ohio. Her recent research focused on understanding how large-scale natural and anthropogenic disturbances impact carbon and nutrient dynamics and vegetation succession in mangrove and coastal deltaic floodplain systems. Dr. Solohin is excited to join the fellowship to study Biscayne National Park’s mangrove forests' resilience to sea level rise, focusing on spatiotemporal variation in soil accretion and carbon accumulation rates.
Understanding how climate change impacts fisheries and aquatic resources in the Midwest
Midwest Region National Park Service Units
An assessment is needed of the vulnerability of fish communities to climate induced change in midwestern park units. The Fellow will leverage data collected through regional networks and state natural resources agencies to determine risk of fish community composition change as a function of climate, instream habitat, and landscape level covariates.
Dr. Greg Jacobs earned a PhD from the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia, a MS in Resource Ecology and Management at the University of Michigan, and a BS in Biology at Alma College. Dr. Jacobs is interested in how life history, movement, and migration of organisms drive their distribution, abundance, and persistence; how human activity may interact with these processes; and how such information may better inform conservation. He pursues these interests using a variety of tools to investigate the population ecology and conservation of (mostly) freshwater and diadromous fishes, and most often through close collaboration with federal and state agency partners. Dr. Jacobs will leverage long-term monitoring datasets and riverscape environmental variation to predict fish species assemblages in Midwest National Parks under climate change, and to evaluate the potential for cascading impacts via host limitation for important mussel species.
Decision-making in the Sagebrush Steppe informed by an Ecosystem Services Approach
Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Curecanti National Recreation Area, and Grand Teton National Park
The development of a framework for the integration of ecosystem service valuations for use throughout the National Park Service will greatly expand park management efforts. The Fellow will quantify selected ecosystem service benefits of fragile ecosystems to develop management scenarios that incorporate valuations of ecosystem services.
Dr. Victoria Bugni
Dr. Victoria Bugni earned her PhD in Economics from the University of Wyoming, with a focus on environmental economics. During her studies, she collaborated with Environment for Development in Tanzania, conducting a survey on the socioeconomic status of the Maasai people in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. She also served as a Recreation and Energy Economics Research Assistant for the U.S. Geological Survey for two years, investigating the socioeconomic impacts of oil and gas development as well as recreational trail development.
Upon graduation, Dr. Bugni joined EcoHealth Alliance, where she developed a cost-benefit analysis for several proposed conservation areas and their alternative uses. Dr. Bugni is excited to make the value of the Sagebrush Steppe ecosystem more accessible to a broader audience through this project.
Learn more about past science fellows and projects
Last updated: July 26, 2024