Dabid will be analyzing vegetation composition and soil core data collected from many ranches across California to look for correlations between plant species composition and soil organic carbon. On working lands, vegetation composition has the potential to alter the amount of carbon being introduced into the soil through a mix of physical and biological processes. Studies have shown that land management practices can greatly influence vegetation composition, thus shifting the soil ecology and chemistry. Loss of native plant populations in the state of California have been linked to a decline in total biodiversity in local ecosystems. By comparing soil carbon data to the above ground vegetation composition, Dabid aims to find possible correlations between native plant species abundance and the amount of soil carbon measured at each sampling site. This project will use data collected by Point Blue Conservation Science’s Rangeland Monitoring Network, a collaborative effort between biologists and private land managers to monitor working lands for soil health, vegetation composition, and bird species diversity. Findings from this study may be used to inform land management practices to preserve and promote the ecological health of rangeland ecosystems.

Jamie is a PhD student at the UC Santa Barbara Bren School of Environmental Science & Management where she is studying restoration ecology and wildlife population dynamics in the coastal dune ecosystem. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Ecology and Systematic Biology from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and has worked as a wildlife biologist on the central coast for over 15 years. In 2020 she earned her Master’s in Environmental Science and Management at Bren, specializing in conservation planning and environmental data science. Her Master’s thesis involved updating habitat connectivity assessments for The Nature Conservancy and the Staying Connected Initiative in the Adirondack Mountains. She has served on the board of the California Central Coast Chapter as Secretary and Treasurer, and is now the UCSB Student Chapter Representative.

She is passionate about wildlife conservation and started her career by tracking California condors at Hi Mountain Lookout and studying kangaroo rat ecology in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes and Carrizo Plains National Monument. Looking to expand her work abroad, she spent time in the tropics studying avian demography and breeding biology in the Amazon basin and Andean cloud forest in Peru, banding forest birds in Hawai’i, and studying mantled howler monkey foraging ecology in Costa Rica. For several years, she has worked for Point Blue Conservation Science at Vandenberg Space Force Base, studying snowy plover productivity and survivorship and coastal dune ecology. When not climbing sand dunes looking for plover chicks on Vandenberg’s beaches, she enjoys native plant gardening, harboring native bees in her yard, baking goodies with locally-grown fruit, and photographing wild things.

Lizzi grew up in rural Colorado and moved to Northern California over a decade ago to attend Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt) where she completed a B.S. in Wildlife Conservation Biology in 2016. She has done research on habitat use of mesocarnivores, impacts of anthropogenic landscape change on osprey nesting success and nest site selection, and blood parasites in osprey nestlings. She is extremely active in the local community and contributes to long-term monitoring in the area in a variety of ways including volunteering at the Humboldt Bay Bird Observatory, the California Bumble Bee Atlas, and leading birding trips with the Redwood Region Audubon Society. During the hunting season, she can be found in the woods/mud hunting for birds with her fiancé and three dogs. Lizzi works as a wildlife biologist for Dudek, an employee-owned environmental consulting firm. She is also currently an NSF Graduate Research Fellow joining Dr. Matt Johnson’s Habitat Ecology Lab at Cal Poly Humboldt to continue one of the longest running raptor projects in North America, the Butte Valley Swainson’s Hawk project, for her graduate studies.