About me

I use a transdisciplinary approach that draws on methods from many disciplines to understand socio-environmental change and how today’s salient human-nature relationships can be marshaled to enact more just and sustainable worlds.

I am currently a scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Colorado where I apply this approach to understand renewable energy transitions. I use remote sensing data, big data, social data, Bayesian hierarchical models and geographic informaiton systems to characterize and project socio-environmental changes associated with the buidout of renewable energy in the Great Plains. I work with colleagues and policymakers to translate these projections to inform renewable energy siting and design.

I bring my joy for birding, painting, Bayesian inference, and outdoor adventure into my research as much as possible, though I have yet to figure out a way of incorporating my enthusiasm for sourdough baking.

From 2021-2024 I was a Gund Postdoctoral Associate a at the University of Vermont, where I worked with Rachelle Gould and Brian Beckage. I completed my PhD in Summer 2021 at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Kai Chan. Before coming to UBC, I received a BA from Harvard University in Environmental Science and Public Policy.

Recent publications:

How are bird populations changing, and do changes in habitat explain these changes? Our new paper in Journal of Animal Ecology shows that Vancouver’s birds have declined by 26% since 1997, and that space-for-time subsitutions only partially expain these changes. Our paper also shows the importance of accounting for scale-dependent habitat-relationships. Free paper.

Humans and nature are mutually entwined, especially in cities; justice frameworks should reflect this inseparability. In a new paper, Mayra Rodríguez González, Rachelle Gould, and I work towards such socio-ecologically just cities. Free paper.

Does macroecological theory about range orientations predict how species move with climate change? Free paper.

Can new deep learning tools classify even low-quality imagery? Yes! Free paper.

Does thinking through relationships help us build solutions towards sustainability? We use worked examples from psychology to ecology to show that the answer is yes. Free paper. Twitter thread summary.

Why do people do what they do? Our recent paper synthesizes human action theories from across disciplines. Free paper. Twitter thread summary.

How can cities stave off heat waves? Brian Beckage and I used Bayesian models and Landsat data to show that coniferous trees may be key for ameliorating heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. Free paper. Twitter thread. What causes this enhanced cooling by conifers? We developed system dynamics models of physical climate to show that three key tree traits seem to drive conifer cooling. Free paper. Twitter thread summary.

Can relational values help explain people’s conservation motivations? Our recent paper using relational values as a framework to show how genetic information and interdependent relationships with nature can motivate the conservation of widespread species. Free paper. Twitter thread.

Do woody perennial polycultures boost bird diversity? Using Bayesian multispecies abundance models in Stan and metacommunity theory, we suggest that they do. Free paper. Twitter Summary. And also biodiversity and ecosystem services more generally. Free paper. Twitter thread.

Based on research with Dr. Mary Caswell Stoddard, we showed that birds can discriminate mixtures of colors that we can only imagine. Free PNAS paper. Twitter thread summary.