Kai Foster is a Project Manager/GIS Analyst with professional and academic experience working with diverse communities on a broad range of environmental issues. In 2008, she joined Conservation Biology Institute focusing her attention primarily on protected areas in the United States. Before joining the CBI team, Kai spent three years working with communities in Western Alaska mapping areas of cultural and ecological significance. Her interest in the relationship between people and landscapes has brought an appreciation and understanding to her current work in protected areas.
Jerre has worked with CBI for 16 years as a conservation ecologist in endangered species research and landscape-scale conservation planning and management of natural resources in the U.S., Europe, and Mexico. She is passionate about developing and orchestrating partnerships among the academic community, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and land managers to leverage funds and information for achieving conservation goals. Throughout her career, Jerre has researched and developed priorities for conservation and funding in California and Baja California, resulting in the acquisition and management of hundreds of thousands of acres for conservation, including the 240,000-acre Tejon Ranch in the Tehachapi Mountains, Donner Summit and Martis Valley in the Sierra Nevada (>15,000 acres), >100,000 acres in San Diego County, and Bahía de San Quintín in Baja California (>5,000 acres). She is project director for the Las Californias Binational Conservation Initiative which promotes creation of a binational park along the Peninsular Ranges of California and Baja-California. She has directed conservation planning, management, and monitoring for California’s Natural Community Conservation Planning programs in southern California, developed a regional program for coordinating management and monitoring in San Diego County, and currently works with land managers and researchers to develop management and monitoring plans for these programs. She coordinated development of the population monitoring framework for the six subspecies of Island Fox on the California Channel Islands and, through a grant from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, developed a science-based regional planning framework for wind energy in the Tehachapi Mountains and southern Sierra Nevada. She serves as a science and education advisor for several land trusts. As a member of the board of Terra Peninsular, she is active in conservation in Baja California.
Dr. Dennis Grossman is a Senior Scientist for the Conservation Biology Institute.
He has worked as a senior scientist for non-profit conservation organizations for the past 20 years, and is a recognized expert in conservation planning, biodiversity assessments, and ecological classification. Dr. Grossman earned his Ph.D. in Plant Ecology from the University of Hawaii in conjunction with the East-West Center . He was awarded M.S. and B.S. degrees in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Denny has made significant contributions in advancing our understanding of terrestrial, freshwater and coastal/marine ecosystems, and in the application of this knowledge for conservation and resource management. He was instrumental in the development of the classification standards for vegetation, freshwater and coastal/marine ecosystems that are now regularly used for conservation planning and resource management by many U.S. and international organizations. He has also focused on the development and use of appropriate technology to ensure the effective application of current scientific information for improved efficiency and effectiveness of ecological assessments and conservation plans.
Dr. Grossman has developed strong partnerships with scientists, public agencies and private corporations to develop and implement novel approaches to conservation and resource management challenges. He has worked extensively with conservation projects and partners across North and South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, South Asia and Indonesia. An author of numerous articles and reports, Dr. Grossman serves on several federal and scientific committees.
While serving for 7 years as Vice-President for Science, Dr. Grossman helped to build NatureServe after it was created as a spin off from the Science Division of The Nature Conservancy. During his 12 years in the position of Chief Ecologist, Dr. Grossman successfully integrated ecological concepts to prioritize conservation actions throughout The Nature Conservancy. He currently serves as a Senior Policy Advisor for The Nature Conservancy.
Dominique was born and raised in northern France. She received her Master’s degree in 1978 in Lille (France) and her Ph.D. in 1983 at Colorado State University working on biogeochemical cycles in the shortgrass prairie. In 1984, after a brief 3 months in Thailand teaching a simulation modeling class, she went to U.C. Riverside as a postdoc simulating nitrogen fixing shrubs in the Sonoran desert then went two years later to New Mexico State University to simulate Chihuahuan desert ecosystem processes. She was hired in 1988 as a contractor for the US EPA in Corvallis (OR) to work on climate change impacts on paddy rice ecosystems in Asia. In 1994 she spent a year working in Toulouse (France) simulating Mediterranean ecosystems. In the Fall of 1995, she started working with a USFS team simulating climate change impacts on global terrestrial systems first out of the University of New Hampshire and then out of Corvallis where she also taught at Oregon State University (OSU) as faculty in the Biological and Ecological Engineering Department. In 2000, she moved to Olympia (WA), telecommuting for her work at OSU. In the fall of 2006, she spent 2 months as invited professor in Paris. She worked as director of the Climate Change Science Team for The Nature Conservancy from January 2007 until August 2008. She went back to OSU as associate professor, continuing her simulation work on climate change impacts. In June 2009, she joined the Conservation Biology Institute. In her free time, she bikes and kayaks, hikes, skis and paints watercolors.
Dave joined the climate change research group at CBI in 2010, to continue his work of modeling the effects of climate change on natural vegetation. He had turned to that challenge in 2001 following a long career in industry. After 5 years in the trenches as the computer guy in the U.S. Forest Service MAPSS modeling team on the Oregon State University campus, he returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. in Biological and Ecological Engineering in 2009. Using the static biogeography model MAPSS and the dynamic global vegetation model MC1, he has run simulations of potential vegetation and vegetation change for a number of areas, principally in the western U.S. He participated in the California Scenarios 2008 project for the California Energy Commission, in a study of Yosemite National Park for the National Park Service, and in several studies of areas in Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico for the U.S. Forest Service. His current interests include bringing vegetation models into the Envision modeling framework developed by the BEE department at OSU.