#SLAGCEcosystems
SPEAKERS
ANASTASIA LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS
Urban Planning
Urban greening through SMART parks
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Associate Provost for Academic Planning at UCLA, Associate Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Professor of Urban Planning. Her area of specialization is urban design, physical and land use planning. She holds degrees in architecture and urban planning and has published extensively on issues relating to parks and public spaces, inner-city revitalization, gentrification and displacement, mobility, walkability, and safety. She has served as a consultant to the Transportation Research Board, Federal Highway Administration, Southern California Association of Governments, South Bay Cities Council of Government, Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, Mineta Transportation Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Los Angeles Metro, the Greek government, and many municipal governments on issues of urban design, open space development, land use and transportation. She has published more than 100 articles and chapters and co-authored or co-edited six books: Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (1998); Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities (2006); Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space; Companion to Urban Design (2009); and The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (2014), and Transit Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? (MIT Press 2019).
CHRISTOPHER M. KELTY
Institute for Society and Genetics
Urban mammals in LA: Disease, genetics, biodiversity and human interaction
Christopher M. Kelty is an anthropologist and historian in the Institute for Society and Genetics. He also has appointments in the department of Information Studies and the department of Anthropology. His research interests center on social theory and technology, the cultural significance of information technology; the relationship of participation, technology and the public sphere. He is the author of the book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences; participation as a political concept, open access in the academy, piracy, the history of software, and many other inadvisably diverse topics.
Currently he is part of an NSF-funded research project on Participation. The project compares cases of mediated participation in multiple domains (from free software to citizen journalism to science and engineering to culture and art). He is also part of ongoing research on aspects of “openness” in science, ranging from issues of open access to scholarly publications to piracy to openness and closure in scientific research both today, and in the past. Christopher is also involved in a variety of projects at the intersection of life science and technology, including historical investigations of software in life science (L-Systems, regular expressions), the use of evolutionary models to study technology, and other ways of making theories come alive in the study of life and is part of a scholarly magazine called Limn.
CONNI PALLINI-TIPTON
Department of City Planning
Wildlife pilot study
With nearly 20 years of public and private sector experience, Conni supervises the long range planning division and is responsible for updating Los Angeles City Planning's General Plan, supervising demographics, and overseeing a wildlife pilot study. She has led the update of 6 of 35 community plans, transportation fees, and played a key role in the study of the city’s industrial land.
DANIEL S. COOPER
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Long-term patterns of urban tolerance in nesting raptors in the Malibu Creek watershed of southern California
Daniel S. Cooper is a doctoral student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA and former California Director of Bird Conservation for the National Audubon Society. He has been collecting and analyzing ecological data, and communicating findings to resource managers and decision-makers for the past two decades. He has published more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers on California natural history, and is the author of Important Bird Areas of California (2004) and Flora of Griffith Park (2015). He is a San Gabriel Valley native and now lives in Ventura County near Thousand Oaks with his wife and two children.
DARREL JENERETTE
Center for Conservation Biology
Drivers and consequences of urban tree biodiversity
Darrel earned his Ph.D. in urban ecology at Arizona State University, then completed a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in ecological informatics at the University of Arizona. He joined the University of California, Riverside as faculty in 2008, leading research on landscape systems including urban, agricultural, and wildlands.
ISAAC BROWN
Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Characterizing subregional ecological units for Los Angeles as a tool for urban ecosystems management
Isaac Brown is a nationally recognized landscape ecologist and planner specializing in urban biodiversity and ecosystem management. He has applied these concepts in professional urban planning and green infrastructure projects worldwide for clients such as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority and a variety of other public and private sector entities. Isaac is currently coordinating an urban biodiversity strategy for the City of Los Angeles with the Bureau of Sanitation and Environment. Isaac holds master’s and bachelor's degrees from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, and is a doctoral candidate in Environmental Science and Engineering at the UCLA Institute of Environment and Sustainability. His research includes developing comprehensive urban ecosystem health indicators for Los Angeles that integrate biodiversity, ecosystem services, pollution management, and environmental hazards. This is the region's first attempt to create a comprehensive urban ecosystem framework for L.A.’s built environment, and represents a promising new direction for sustainability of cities worldwide.
LILA HIGGINS
Natural History Museum of LA County
Increasing community access to science through community science
Lila Higgins is a museum educator with 15 years of experience in environmental education, exhibit development, and citizen science programming. In late 2008 she joined the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles working in the Education & Exhibits department. She oversees the Museum’s Community Science and Live Animal programs, and is also the lead educator on the museum’s newest indoor/outdoor exhibit, focused on public participation in urban biodiversity research. She is also the co-founder of the global project City Nature Challenge. Lila holds a bachelor’s degree in entomology from University of California, Riverside and a master’s degree in environmental education from California State University, San Bernardino.
MAS DOJIRI
LA Sanitation
Biodiversity in Los Angeles
Mas DojirI is currently the Assistant General Manager at LA Sanitation & Environment (LASAN) and is LASAN’s Chief Scientist. He oversees the Technical Services Divisions, which consists of the Environmental Monitoring, Information & Control Systems, Industrial Safety & Compliance, Industrial Waste Management, and Regulatory Affairs Divisions. He received his BA in Biological Sciences from UCSB, his Master’s Degree in Marine Biology from CSULB, and his PhD from Boston University in Marine Biology. Mas also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
As chief scientist, Mas plays a vital role in LASAN's response to the Exide Battery Recycling environmental cleanup, as well as providing information and recommendations for the recent Hepatitis-A and typhus outbreaks in Los Angeles County. Mas began his 30-year career with the City of Los Angeles as a water biologist in the Environmental Monitoring Division and has also served as as environmental affairs officer with the Regulatory Affairs Division, where he initiated EPA’s Total Maximum Daily Load Program for the city of Los Angeles, and has served as the division manager of the Environmental Monitoring Division, which is in charge of monitoring Santa Monica Bay (including our beaches), LA Harbor, Ballona Creek, LA River, all the urban lakes within LA, all the city’s landfills, stormwater, and water reclamation plants.
In addition, Mas serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System and is also the current Vice-Chair of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission’s Technical Advisory Committee, a member of the USC Sea Grant Advisory Council, and served as both the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Board of Commissioners for the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project. Mas serves as the chair of the Environmental Biology subcommittee of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists and was instrumental to the team that created a national Board Certification for Environment Scientists.
MIA LEHRER
FASLA Studio-MLA
Habitat for people
Mia Lehrer, FASLA is the founder of the Los Angeles-based landscape architecture and urban design firm, Mia Lehrer + Associates (ML+A), known for the design and implementation of ambitious public and private-sector projects including complex mixed-use development projects, urban revitalization initiatives, and neighborhood and regional parks. A native of El Salvador, Ms. Lehrer earned her Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has applied landscape and urban design innovation and technical expertise on complex Design/Build infrastructure projects, and continues to play a significant leadership role in project stakeholder outreach and consensus building. She has been personally engaged in urban initiatives that include the recalibration of significant works of infrastructure such as channelized rivers, sea ports, military air stations and oil fields from single purpose sites to multi-purpose community resources. Her design excellence and environmental leadership enables government agencies, communities, and stakeholders to create an interconnected system of meaningful open space through well-conceived projects. Within this process, the role of infrastructure is examined for opportunities to improve the relationship between the built environment, natural ecology, and community, thereby enhancing the functionality, mobility, efficiency, and integrity of place.
NATASHA STAVROS
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Urban land-cover mapping
Dr. E. Natasha Stavros is an applied science system engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. She specializes in end-to-end data and information system engineering, which includes facilitating collaborations among interdisciplinary researchers and decision makers (managers & policy), mapping inter-organizational information systems, assessing market needs, and architect-ing and managing projects/tasks to fill gaps between information demand and data supply. She developed these skills as a fire and terrestrial ecosystem ecologist, but applies them in other complex systems, with particular emphasis on NASA flight projects, technology and data systems.
She received a B.A. in mathematics and computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder where her career with NASA began at the Laboratory of Atmosphere and Space Physics (LASP) doing mission operations and data analysis for data product calibration. She received a M.S. in environmental sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland specializing in remote observation integration into a mechanistic model for forest management, and a Ph.D. in forest and fire ecology from the University of Washington specializing in linking climate, fire ecology, and air quality degradation.
RYAN J HARRIGAN
Institute of the Environment
and Sustainability
The bird genoscape project
Ryan Harrigan is an assistant adjunct professor and assistant researcher at the Center for Tropical Research in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is currently focused on how both species can be understood using modeling combined with environmental and socioeconomic predictors. Additional research activities focus on developing spatial prioritization of species based on climate change, adaptive potential, and other novel metrics of biodiversity. Ryan received a dual B.S. in biology and archaeology from Boston University in 1998, and his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Boston University in 2006.
SOPHIE S. PARKER
The Nature Conservancy
Biodiversity analysis in Los Angeles (BAILA)
Sophie Parker is a senior scientist in the Los Angeles office of The Nature Conservancy. She has over 20 years of experience in ecology and conservation science, and has provided scientific leadership to Conservancy projects in southern California since 2008. Dr. Parker leads The Nature Conservancy of California’s Renewable Energy science team in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, and provides science guidance for organization’s stormwater capture and habitat enhancement engagement along the Los Angeles River. In addition, she is forging new methodologies for the planning and implementation of urban conservation through the Biodiversity Analysis in Los Angeles (BAILA) project.
Prior to joining The Nature Conservancy, Dr. Parker was a postdoctoral scholar studying mycorrhizal fungi in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara. In 2006, she received her Ph.D. from the department of ecology, evolution, and marine biology at UC Santa Barbara, where she examined the role of soil nitrogen in preventing the reestablishment of native bunchgrasses in previously invaded California grasslands. One of Dr. Parker’s long-term career goals is to better integrate the fields of soil science and ecosystem ecology into conservation practice.
THOMAS W. GILLESPIE
Geography; Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Biodiversity atlas for Los Angeles
Tom Gillespie is a professor of geography and an expert on biodiversity whose research focuses on conservation and protection of endangered forests and species, primarily by using remote sensing via satellites to determine biodiversity to influence global conservation priorities.
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In his work to save what many have called the world’s most endangered forests, Gillespie has surveyed the tropical dry forests in such biodiverse hotspots as Hawaii, Sundaland, Indo-Burma, New Caledonia and the Caribbean, using satellites. His research has yielded valuable information on global conservation priorities, the management of natural resources and tropical ecology. By using remote-sensing data, he hopes to predict how species spread or the probability of extinction in these fragile environments.
URSULA K. HEISE
English; Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Urban biodiversity: Cultures, stories, taxonomies
Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave, and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is also a co-founder of UCLA's Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link.
ROBERT WAYNE
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Conservation challenges and monitoring
GLEN MACDONALD
Geography
21st century climate warming, aridity and responses of wildland and urban vegetation in the Los Angeles region
Glen Sproul dit MacDonald is an UCLA Distinguished Professor and holder of the John Muir Memorial Chair in Geography. He conducts research on climate change and its impacts using long-temporal records and large geospatial data sets including those provided by satellite remote sensing.
ALEXIS LANTZ
Los Angeles County Department of Public Health
Public health approaches to sustainability
Alexis Lantz is an urban planner at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health PLACE Program. In her role at PLACE she has assisted cities and the County with active transportation planning, policy development, and funding. She currently oversees Step by Step LA County; Pedestrian Plans for Unincorporated Communities and is helping lead the County of Los Angeles Vision Zero initiative. Previously, she was the Planning & Policy Director at the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC). Alexis holds an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA. While at UCLA, she initiated a student-led course on bicycle and pedestrian planning that continues today and authored the report “Cycling in Los Angeles” as a Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative fellow.
RACHEL MEYER
UC Conservation Genomics Consortium
The California environmental DNA citizen science program puts biodiversity inventory in your hands
Rachel Meyer joined the Consortium in 2016 with two main roles: to manage the program, including our citizen science activities, and to expand the research on biodiversity conservation focused on plants. Her research background is all-around botany, which includes genomics, phytochemistry, and ethnobotany. I’ve done botanical research in many parts of Asia and West Africa. She obtained her PhD in 2012 from City University of New York and the New York Botanical Garden. She was an NSF Plant Genome postdoctoral fellow at NYU’s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. She also served the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology as a AAAS Science Policy Fellow. She now works across disciplines and connects with the many stakeholders and interest groups focused on understanding and monitoring the state’s tremendous biodiversity resources. She is now leading a statewide community science effort called CALeDNA, which aims to address problems in biodiversity monitoring by pairing volunteer community scientists with University of California researchers to collect soil samples from across California. By analyzing the environmental DNA (eDNA) from the soil samples, can assess the biodiversity of microbes, fungi, plants and animals.
BRAD SHAFFER
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Conservation genomics of reptiles and amphibians
Brad Shaffer is a UCLA Distinguished Professor with joint appointments in the Institute of Environment & Sustainability and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He moved from UC Davis in 2012 to be the founding director of the UCLA/La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science, and remains in that position. Brad’s research resides at the intersection of conservation biology, genomics, and the evolutionary ecology of reptiles and amphibians, and his work takes him to remote field sites around the glove and vacant lots in Los Angeles. He has received teaching awards at the campus and national level, and is past president of the American Genetic Association and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. He is also passionate about the importance of biological field stations as a way to lure people away from their computers and get them to study nature. He is also the director of two field stations in the Santa Monica Mountains.
MICHAEL JERRETT
Environmental Health Sciences
Physical activity through sustainable transport approaches
(PASTA) in Los Angeles
Dr. Michael Jerrett is an internationally recognized expert in Geographic Information Science for Exposure Assessment and Spatial Epidemiology. He is professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. Dr. Jerrett earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto (Canada). For the past 15 years, Dr. Jerrett has researched how to characterize population exposures to air pollution and built environmental variables, how to understand the social distribution of these exposures among different groups (e.g., poor vs. wealthy), and how to assess the health effects from environmental exposures. Over the decade, Dr. Jerrett has also studied the contribution of the built and natural environment to physical activity, behavior and obesity. In 2009, the United States National Academy of Science appointed Dr. Jerrett to the Committee on “Future of Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21st Century.” The committee recently concluded its task with the publication of a report entitled “Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy.” In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appointed Dr. Jerrett to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Sub-Committee for Nitrogen Oxides. In 2014, Dr. Jerrett was named to the Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers, indicating he is in the top 1% of all authors in the fields of Environment/Ecology in terms of citation by other researchers.
SETH RILEY
U.S. National Parks Service; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife management in urban landscapes
Seth is a biologist for the National Park Service and and Associate Adjunct Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UCLA. His research focuses on the ecology and conservation of wildlife in fragmented urban landscapes and he has published papers on such topics including impact of freeways on wildlife movement, anticoagulant rodenticides use in urban-wildland interfaces, and zoonotic parasites of bobcats in urban landscapes.
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He received his B.A. in animal behavior and ecology from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis.