USA National Phenology Network

Mark D. Schwartz (Chair) is a bioclimatologist and Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as co-founder of the USA-NPN. For twenty-five years, he has been involved in a wide range of phenological research, especially at the continental-scale, which has produced over fifty journal articles, scholarly reviews, and book chapters, as well as the edited book “Phenology: An Integrative Environmental Science”. Schwartz is also Principal Investigator of the USA-NPN Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant, which is funded from 2007-2012 by the National Science Foundation.
Email: mds@uwm.edu
URL: http://people.uwm.edu/mds
(term expires in December 2011, Chair for 2010)

Susan J. Mazer (Vice Chair) is an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Ecology & Evolution at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the evolution of life history and reproductive traits within and among wild species. Her lab is currently examining the causes and consequences of the evolution of flowering time, self-fertilization, physiological performance, and drought-avoidance in the wildflower genus Clarkia in the southern Sierra Nevada, where plants may be particularly vulnerable to water stress and the effects of climate change.
Email: mazer@lifesci.ucsb.edu
URL: http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/eemb/faculty/mazer/index.html
(term expires in December 2011, Vice Chair for 2010)

Julio L. Betancourt is a Senior Scientist with USGS, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Arizona, and a co-founder of USA-NPN. He investigates climatic influences on streamflow and ecosystem dynamics to inform risk and resource management, and is a leading expert on the vegetation history of the North and South American deserts. He is leading the battle to keep buffelgrass from transforming the Sonoran Desert into flammable grassland (www.buffelgrass.org). In 2009, he received the Presidential Rank Award and was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
Email: jlbetanc@usgs.gov
URL: http://wwwpaztcn.wr.usgs.gov/julio_cv.html
(term expires in December 2010)

David D. Breshears is an ecologist and Professor of Natural Resources in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona, where he also has a joint appointment in the Department in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and an affiliation with the Institute for Environment and Society. His research focuses on vegetation along gradients of woody plant cover and associated ecohydrological and erosional relationships, including drought-induced tree die-off. He is a recent Fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program that focuses on enhancing communication to the public and policy makers, is a co-founding editor of the journal Ecohydrology, serves on the Science Steering Committee of B2 EarthScience at Biosphere 2, and currently chairs the Ecological Society of America's Board of Professional Certification.
Email: daveb@email.arizona.edu
URL: http://www.cals.arizona.edu/research/breshears/
(term expires in December 2012)

Patty Glick is Senior Global Warming Specialist at the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). She has been dedicated to the issue of climate change for more than 18 years. Much of her work has focused on translating the science of global warming and its impacts on fish and wildlife into creative and understandable outreach tools, including the award-winning Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming. In 2007, Ms. Glick was one of 23 women around the world named as “An outstanding woman working on climate change issues” by The World Conservation Union (IUCN), and she was recognized by The Wildlife Society as “Today’s Wildlife Professional” in The Wildlife Professional, Fall 2008.
Email: Glick@nwf.org
(term expires in December 2012)

John E. Gross is an ecologist with the National Park Service, Office of Inventory, Monitoring , and Evaluation. He supports the monitoring of park natural resources, with a strong focus on broad-scale issues including monitoring and evaluation of the effects of land cover and land use changes on park resources, and developing effective responses to climate change. John has been with the National Park Service since 2003; prior to this he was Principal Research Ecologist (landscape ecology) with CSIRO and Senior Researcher at Colorado State University.
Email: John_Gross@NPS.gov
URL: http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/monitor/index.cfm
(term expires in December 2010)

Sandra Henderson is a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO and the Director for Project BudBurst. She is particularly interested in science education programs and citizen science campaigns that address the needs of underrepresented populations. Dr. Henderson served as Co-Director of LEARN: Atmospheric Science Explorer’s, an NSF teacher enhancement program. She is the former Director of Education for GLOBE. Before becoming a science educator, she worked as a project scientist studying biodiversity and climate change at the U.S. EPA’s Environmental Research Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon.
Email: sandrah@ucar.edu
(term expires in December 2010)

Geoffrey M. Henebry is a Professor of Biology and Geography and a Senior Research Scientist at the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence, South Dakota State University. He received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in 1982, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Sciences from The University of Texas at Dallas in 1986 and 1989, respectively. His research interests are broad, but a recurrent theme is use of remote sensing to study ecological patterns and processes, including the interplay between land surface phenology and land cover / land use change.
Email: Geoffrey.Henebry@sdstate.edu
URL: http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu
(term expires in December 2011)

David W. Inouye is Professor of Biology at the University of Maryland, where he directs a graduate program in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology. Since 1972 he has spent summers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (Gothic, Colorado), where he has conducted a long-term study (since 1973) of variation in the abundance and phenology of wildflowers. Data from this study are showing the consequences of climate change on phenology and demography of several species. He is also working on bumble bees and pollination biology.
Email: inouye@umd.edu
URL: http://www.life.umd.edu/biology/faculty/inouye/inouye2.htm
(term expires in December 2011)

Joseph Russo is a Senior Scientist and President of ZedX, Inc., an information technology (IT) company specializing in decision-support algorithms and data visualization tools for the agricultural and environmental industries. He has been involved in the design and development of interactive, web-based, decision-support platforms and learning services for the agricultural sector, including the ipmPIPE for the USDA, and AgFleet for the precision agriculture community. In 2008, he was one of three recipients of the national PrecisionAg Award of Excellence, which is given by The PrecisionAg Institute.
ZedX, Inc.
Email: russo@zedxinc.com
URL: http://zedxinc.com
(term expires in December 2010) 

Inigo San Gil is the liason between the National Biological Information Infrastructure and the Long Term Ecological Research network. He coordinates interoperability among the programs.  Inigo brokered over 30,000 ecological datasets into the national biological clearinghouses.Inigo was born in San Sebastian, Spain and earned a B.S in Physics from the University of Zaragoza and a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Yale. Inigo joined IBM and Los Alamos National Lab where he performed simulations and data analysis on supercomputers. Before working with NBII, Inigo managed the Yale Core Facility for Bioinformatics where he developed web-enabled databases and data analysis tools for genetics.
Email: isangil@lternet.edu
(term expires in December 2012)

Bruce E. Wilson is the Group Leader for Environmental Data Science and Systems, in the Environmental Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That group operates data centers for the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the US Geological Survey. The group also does research on tools and methods for the harvesting and delivery of ecological and climate data to researchers, decision makers, and educators. Wilson also holds a joint appointment with the University of Tennessee, in the School of Information Science, where his research is on methods to improve the retention and distribution of scientific data.
Email: wilsonbe@ornl.gov
URL: http://www.ornl.gov/~wb5
(term expires in December 2012)

Tim Owen is Deputy Chief of the Climate Services Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NOAA/NCDC). Mr. Owen has worked on a variety of projects at NCDC, including climate data validation, urban heat-island research, climate normals generation, climate applications using GIS, assessment of socioeconomic information, and the start of drought.gov - the web portal of the National Integrated Drought Information System. He holds graduate degrees from Penn State (M.S., 1995) and UNC Chapel Hill (M.R.P., 2000), where he respectively conducted research on satellite studies of urban regions and environmental planning for viewsheds. In recent years, he has served as NCDC's National Partnership Liaison and Executive Officer. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles, and has provided input to both the 2007 IPCC and 2009 Climate Change Impacts reports.
Tim.Owen@noaa.gov
(non-voting liaison to NOAA/NCDC)

The USA-NPN Executive Committee includes the Board of Directors, the Executive Director (Jake F. Weltzin), and the Assistant Director (Abraham Miller-Rushing).