The La Kretz Center postdoctoral fellowship program supports scholars who conduct innovative research that interfaces with the conservation and management agencies that direct and lead California conservation. Our emphasis is on biological conservation, and our postdocs work in any discipline that provides the scientific research critical to the preservation, protection, management, or restoration of at-risk species, environments, or ecological communities in California.
PROJECTS
Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot is studying the impacts of air pollution on birds, including effects on behavior, species distributions, and detectability, working in collaboration with the National Park Service, the Natural…
La Kretz Postdoc Sarah Helman is investigating the intersecting effects of urbanization, diet and rodenticides on local coyote health, working in collaboration with the National Park Service, the Urban Nature…
La Kretz Postdoc Zachary MacDonald is using a combination of whole-genome sequence data and forward-in-time landscape and environmental modelling to predict how changes to habitat suitability, habitat connectivity, and climatic…
Restoration of coastal sage scrub communities is important for the conservation of native biodiversity in urban areas of Southern California. A key species of coastal sage scrub, California buckwheat (Eriogonum…
This project aims to determine optimal strategies for conserving endangered Yosemite Toads (Anaxyrus canorus). Populations of Yosemite toads (Anaxyrus canorus), endemic to the Sierra Nevada range in California, plummeted in…
In collaboration with the National Park Service, La Kretz Postdoc Rachel Blakey is investigating how large wildfires, like the Woolsey fire of 2018, influence the movement and behavior of California's top carnivore: the mountain lion.
La Kretz Postdoc Joscha Beninde is conducting a comparative landscape genomics study to understand how species survive and thrive in urban environments.
The La Kretz Center is partnering with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to generate genomic data to inform species listing decisions under the US Endangered Species Act.
Rapidly changing climate in California and around the world has the potential to cause a mismatch between the environmental conditions that plants are adapted to and the environmental conditions they…
La Kretz Center Postdoc Alex Pivovaroff works on looking at native species response to environmental change throughout the year.
Human activities are dramatically impacting ecosystems worldwide due to air pollution – and resulting changes to climate and nitrogen cycling – and the spread of nonnative plant species. These drivers of global change may have strong and interactive ecological effects, but the evolutionary impacts of these factors are poorly understood. La Kretz postdoc Justin Valliere is currently exploring potential adaptation to nitrogen pollution and climate in common invasive plant species of California. This study will have important implications for invasive plant management under predicted global change.
California’s native ecosystems are increasingly impacted by nitrogen deposition resulting from air pollution, particularly in the greater Los Angeles area. This project, led by La Kretz postdoc Justin Valliere, extends an ongoing collaboration between the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the UCLA, with the goal of understanding the ecological impacts of nitrogen pollution on the severely threatened coastal sage scrub plant community of the Santa Monica Mountains.
UCLA researchers are actively restoring this site with native California grassland plants
La Kretz Postdoc John Benson's work suggests that a new immigrant lion every two to four years is necessary for the Santa Monica Mountains population to remain viable
La Kretz Postdoc Alex Pivovaroff studies the physiological mechanisms that control live fuel moisture in our Santa Monica Mountains.
La Kretz Center Postdoctoral Fellow Gary Bucciarelli works with the National Park Service to study threatened amphibian populations in southern California.
As a La Kretz/Natural History Museum postdoc, Elizabeth Long conducted a comprehensive resurvey of butterflies across the Santa Monica Mountains and Los Angeles
Published Work | 2024 | Global Ecology and Conservation (Vol. 54)
permalinkPublished Work | 2024 | Ornithology
permalinkPublished Work | 2022 | Current Biology
permalinkPublished Work | 2022 | Functional Ecology
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | PNAS December 10, 2019 116 (50) 25179-25185
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | Biological Conservation
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | Ecological Applications 00(00):e02029
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | International Journal of Plant Science
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | Fire 2019, 2(2), 28
permalinkPublished Work | 2019 | New Phytologist
download pdf permalinkPublished Work | 2018 | Restoration Ecology
permalinkPublished Work | 2017 | Global Change Biology
download pdf permalinkPublished Work | 2016 | AoB PLANTS 8: plw011
permalinkPublished Work | 2016 | Proc. R. Soc. B 283 : 20160957
permalinkPublished Work | 2015 | Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 116(3)
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