I am an applied ecosystem ecologist who works to understand how climate change and altered drought will interact with disturbances to impact dryland vegetation.  My research themes include climate-driven shifts in dryland ecological drought, changes in the structure and distribution of vegetation in sagebrush ecosystems, management options to enhance dry forest and woodland sustainability, and strategies for enhancing dryland restoration strategies in a warmer world.  I am a research ecologist with the USGS Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center & Southwest Biological Science Center, located in Flagstaff, Arizona.

I am a postdoctoral researcher with the US Geological Survey and affiliated with Northern Arizona University's Center for Adaptable Western Landscapes. My research interests focus on plant responses to changing climate conditions across the Western US and how we communicate modeling results to land management practitioners. My specific foci are in pinyon-juniper woodlands, where I combine large inventory data with different types of models under a variety of future climate scenarios. In future work, I hope to apply my dissertation experience studying soil carbon sequestration in temperate forests to dryland ecosystems. 

I am a plant and quantitative ecologist interested in population and community responses to environmental variability. In particular, I am fascinated by how plants persist under abiotic and biotic unpredictability and uncertainty. As a post-doctoral research ecologist with the US Geological Survey’s Southwest Biological Science Center, I work to understand the environmental variables that influence plant regeneration in the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. My research synthesizes existing knowledge about priority restoration species to develop new models to forecast successful plant establishment in the western US drylands. In my dissertation, I studied the effect of temporal variability on the ecology and evolution of annual plants.