As the Director of Ecoinformatics and Climate Solutions at Point Blue, Sam leads a team that uses our science to help decision makers and natural resource managers prepare for future environmental changes. His group specializes in the development of models and tools that enable climate-smart decision making. We work in ecosystems ranging from upland and tidal marsh ecosystems in the San Francisco Estuary, to coastal forests and grasslands of the Pacific Northwest, to the deserts of the southwest United States and in the Ross Sea in Antarctica. Sam also represents Point Blue on the Avian Knowledge Network Steering Committee.
Sam’s personal research focuses on studies of spatial patterns of species occurrence and abundance across the landscape. Most of his work explores, through modeling, how species will respond in space to changing climate and other environmental change. By understanding how species respond to changing environmental conditions and incorporating novel methods for dealing with future uncertainty into our analyses, we can better inform conservation decision making.
Sam came to Point Blue in 2010 after working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studied how plant species responded to global warming following the last deglaciation as a proxy for how species will respond to future climate change. He received his PhD from UC Davis in ecology in 2008 where he studied how urbanization in Australia led to behavioral changes in megabats and the coincidental emergence of fatal zoonotic diseases in humans. He received his bachelors degree in environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz in 1997.