Adina Merenlender

Last updated
Adina M. Merenlender
Born
Adina Maya Merenlender

(1963-10-01) October 1, 1963 (age 60)
Seattle, Washington
Nationality American
Alma mater University of California, San Diego
Princeton University
University of Rochester
Scientific career
Fields Conservation biology, environmental science
Institutions University of California, Berkeley
Stanford University
Thesis The Effects of Sociality on the Demography and Genetic Structure of Lemur fulvus rufus (polygamous) and Lemur rubriventer (monogamous) & the Conservation Implications [1]
Website nature.berkeley.edu/merenlender/

Adina Merenlender (born October 1, 1963) is a Professor of Cooperative Extension in Conservation Science at University of California, Berkeley in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department, and is an internationally recognized conservation biologist known for land-use planning, watershed science, landscape connectivity, and naturalist and stewardship training.

Contents

Early life and education

Merenlender was born in Seattle, Washington and raised in West Los Angeles, California. [2]

Merenlender graduated from UC California San Diego in 1985 with a BA in Biology, where she also received her MS from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 1986. [3] She was a visiting graduate student at Princeton University from 1987 to 1993, [4] and she graduated from the University of Rochester in 1993 with a PhD in Biology. [3]

Career

After earning her PhD in Biology, Merenlender did her post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University from 1993-1995, [5] researching riparian plant and aquatic insect communities on Great Basin working lands under different livestock grazing regimes. [6] She started her career at UC Berkeley as assistant cooperative extension specialist and adjunct professor in 1995, at which time she moved to Mendocino County to conduct research at the UC Hopland Research and Extension Center, a 5,000-acre field station. [5]

Upon arriving in California's wine country, Merenlender conducted some of the first research in Vinecology, [7] the integration of ecological and viticultural practice to produce solutions for wine production and nature conservation. [8] Merenlender continues to advance conservation. [9] [10] [11] Her work across California's North Coast vineyard landscape also includes watershed studies, revealing ways to avoid summer water withdrawals from streams to irrigate wine grapes, which is a necessary step to recovering California's salmon runs. [12] [13]

Merenlender led the earliest inquiries into the realized conservation benefits, or lack thereof, from conservation easements which spurred a large and still-growing body of scholarship on the topic. [14]  She also provided some of the first evidence for the impacts of quiet recreation on meso-carnivores and sparked continued field research into recreation management to minimize these impacts. [15] [16]

Merenlender started the California Naturalist Program [17] and served as its founding director, [5] [18] which to date has graduated over 4,000 certified California Naturalists. Building on the success of this program, Merenlender helped start the first public education and service program on climate stewardship, [19] including writing Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California with Brendan Buhler. [20] [21] The two programs provide collective impact on ecological health through community and citizen science.

In 2004, Merenlender was a visiting scholar at the University of Queensland Department of Zoology in Brisbane, Australia. She was also a visiting scholar at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City in 2008, and with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative through the University of Cambridge Zoology Department in 2019. [5]

As president, Merenlender worked with the Governing Board and staff to reorganize the Society of Conservation Biology as a global network to preserve biodiversity.

Awards and honors

Published works

Merenlender has published over 100 scientific research articles on the relationships between land use and biodiversity, [5] and co-authored a book on wildlife corridor planning, Corridor Ecology: The science and practice of linking landscapes for biodiversity conservation, [28] with the first edition published in 2006 and the second in 2019. She also co-authored The California Naturalist Handbook, [29] and Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California. [21]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation biology</span> Study of threats to biological diversity

Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Habitat conservation</span> Management practice for protecting types of environments

Habitat conservation is a management practice that seeks to conserve, protect and restore habitats and prevent species extinction, fragmentation or reduction in range. It is a priority of many groups that cannot be easily characterized in terms of any one ideology.

An ecological or environmental crisis occurs when changes to the environment of a species or population destabilizes its continued survival. Some of the important causes include:

A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity that is threatened by human habitation. Norman Myers wrote about the concept in two articles in The Environmentalist in 1988 and 1990, after which the concept was revised following thorough analysis by Myers and others into “Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions” and a paper published in the journal Nature, both in 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Habitat fragmentation</span> Discontinuities in an organisms environment causing population fragmentation.

Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment, and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat fragmentation is a process by which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches of habitats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flagship species</span> Concept in conservation biology

In conservation biology, a flagship species is a species chosen to raise support for biodiversity conservation in a given place or social context. Definitions have varied, but they have tended to focus on the strategic goals and the socio-economic nature of the concept, to support the marketing of a conservation effort. The species need to be popular, to work as symbols or icons, and to stimulate people to provide money or support.

The Lower Guinean forests also known as the Lower Guinean-Congolian forests, are a region of coastal tropical moist broadleaf forest in West Africa, extending along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Guinea from eastern Benin through Nigeria and Cameroon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation-dependent species</span> IUCN conservation category

A conservation-dependent species is a species which has been categorized as "Conservation Dependent" ("LR/cd") by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), as dependent on conservation efforts to prevent it from becoming endangered. A species that is reliant on the conservation attempts of humans is considered conservation dependent. Such species must be the focus of a continuing species-specific and/or habitat-specific conservation program, the cessation of which would result in the species qualifying for one of the threatened categories within a period of five years. The determination of status is constantly monitored and can change.

In landscape ecology, landscape connectivity is, broadly, "the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes movement among resource patches". Alternatively, connectivity may be a continuous property of the landscape and independent of patches and paths. Connectivity includes both structural connectivity and functional connectivity. Functional connectivity includes actual connectivity and potential connectivity in which movement paths are estimated using the life-history data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marxan</span>

MARXAN is a family of software designed to aid systematic reserve design on conservation planning. With the use of stochastic optimisation routines Marxan generates spatial reserve systems that achieve particular biodiversity representation goals with reasonable optimality. Over the years, Marxan has grown from its standard two zone application to consider more complex challenges like incorporating connectivity, probabilities and multiple zones. Along the way, Marxan’s user community has also built plug-ins and interfaces to assist with planning projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wildlife corridor</span> Connecting wild territories for animals

A wildlife corridor, habitat corridor, or green corridor is an area of habitat connecting wildlife populations separated by human activities or structures. This allows an exchange of individuals between populations, which may help prevent the negative effects of inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity that often occur within isolated populations. Corridors may also help facilitate the re-establishment of populations that have been reduced or eliminated due to random events. This may moderate some of the worst effects of habitat fragmentation, whereas urbanization can split up habitat areas, causing animals to lose both their natural habitat and the ability to move between regions to access resources. Habitat fragmentation due to human development is an ever-increasing threat to biodiversity, and habitat corridors serve to manage its effects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global biodiversity</span> Total variability of Earths life forms

Global biodiversity is the measure of biodiversity on planet Earth and is defined as the total variability of life forms. More than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1 trillion, but most estimates are around 11 million species or fewer. About 1.74 million species were databased as of 2018, and over 80 percent have not yet been described. The total amount of DNA base pairs on Earth, as a possible approximation of global biodiversity, is estimated at 5.0 x 1037, and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. Josh Donlan</span>

C. Josh Donlan is ecologist and conservation practitioner who founded and leads Advanced Conservation Strategies (ACS). The environmental conservation NGO focuses on program design, sustainability sciences, and evaluation. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific and popular articles, some of them receiving widespread media attention. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He splits his time between the Wasatch Mountains and Andalucia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biodiversity loss</span> Extinction of species or loss of species in a given habitat

Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent. It is temporary if the damage that led to the loss is reversible in time, for example through ecological restoration. If this is not possible, then the decrease is permanent. The cause of most of the biodiversity loss is, generally speaking, human activities that push the planetary boundaries too far. These activities include habitat destruction and land use intensification. Further problem areas are air and water pollution, over-exploitation, invasive species and climate change.

Erika S. Zavaleta is an American professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Zavaleta is recognized for her research focusing on topics including plant community ecology, conservation practices for terrestrial ecosystems, and impacts of community dynamics on ecosystem functions.

The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC), established in 2009 in the United States, are a network of 22 regional conservation bodies covering the entire United States and adjacent areas. They are autonomous cooperatives sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior and aim to develop coordinated conservation strategies applicable to large areas of land. Partnerships are formed with government and non-government conservation organizations to achieve common goals of conservation. While fairly new as government supported entities, the LCCs are similar to initiatives that have been started or advocated in other countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Bekessy</span> Australian conservation scientist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Working landscape</span> Type of landscape

Working landscapes are landscapes used for farming, ranching and/or forestry. Recently, these have become the focus of efforts to conserve biodiversity, as these now cover more than 80% of Earth's land, and therefore offer increasing opportunities for conservation and restoration. Though some parts of these landscapes may be used so intensively that they may be unable to sustain native species, working landscapes generally also include significant areas of habitats suitable for native species within their diverse and multifunctional mosaics of intensively used, fallow, and regenerating areas.

References

  1. ↑ Merenlender, Adina Maya (August 2, 1993). The effects of sociality on the demography and genetic structure of Lemur fulvus rufus (polygamous) and Lemur rubriventer (monogamous) and the conservation implications – via catalog.princeton.edu.
  2. ↑ Resources, University of California Agriculture and Natural. "Our Lab". ucanr.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  3. 1 2 "Adina MERENLENDER". Our Environment at Berkeley. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  4. ↑ "Dobson Lab People". dobber.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Home Page - Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources". ucanr.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  6. ↑ Kennedy, Tom B.; Merenlender, Adina M.; Vinyard, Gary L. (2000). "A Comparison of Riparian Condition and Aquatic Invertebrate Community Indices in Central Nevada". Western North American Naturalist. 60 (3): 255–272. ISSN   1527-0904. JSTOR   41717042.
  7. ↑ Viers, Joshua H.; Williams, John N.; Nicholas, Kimberly A.; Barbosa, Olga; Kotzé, Inge; Spence, Liz; Webb, Leanne B.; Merenlender, Adina; Reynolds, Mark (2013-03-15). "Vinecology: pairing wine with nature". Conservation Letters. 6 (5): 287–299. Bibcode:2013ConL....6..287V. doi: 10.1111/conl.12011 . ISSN   1755-263X.
  8. ↑ Heaton, Emily; Merenlender, Adina M. (May 2000). "Modeling vineyard expansion, potential habitat fragmentation". California Agriculture. 54 (3): 12–19. doi: 10.3733/ca.v054n03p12 . ISSN   0008-0845.
  9. ↑ Kremen, C.; Merenlender, A. M. (2018-10-18). "Landscapes that work for biodiversity and people". Science. 362 (6412): eaau6020. doi: 10.1126/science.aau6020 . ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   30337381. S2CID   53012788.
  10. ↑ Muñoz-Sáez, Andrés; Kitzes, Justin; Merenlender, Adina M. (2020-08-20). "Bird-friendly wine country through diversified vineyards". Conservation Biology. 35 (1): 274–284. doi:10.1111/cobi.13567. ISSN   0888-8892. PMID   32510666. S2CID   219538145.
  11. ↑ Muñoz-Sáez, Andrés; Heaton, Emily E.; Reynolds, Mark; Merenlender, Adina M. (September 2020). "Agricultural adapters from the vineyard landscape impact native oak woodland birds". Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. 300: 106960. Bibcode:2020AgEE..30006960M. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2020.106960. ISSN   0167-8809. S2CID   219523329.
  12. ↑ Grantham, T. E.; Mezzatesta, M.; Newburn, D. A.; Merenlender, A. M. (2013-01-24). "Evaluating Tradeoffs Between Environmental Flow Protections and Agricultural Water Security". River Research and Applications. 30 (3): 315–328. doi:10.1002/rra.2637. ISSN   1535-1459. S2CID   59143072.
  13. ↑ Grantham, Theodore E.; Newburn, David A.; McCarthy, Michael A.; Merenlender, Adina M. (May 2012). "The Role of Streamflow and Land Use in Limiting Oversummer Survival of Juvenile Steelhead in California Streams". Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. 141 (3): 585–598. Bibcode:2012TrAFS.141..585G. doi:10.1080/00028487.2012.683472. ISSN   0002-8487.
  14. ↑ Merenlender, A. M.; Huntsinger, L.; Guthey, G.; Fairfax, S. K. (February 2004). "Land Trusts and Conservation Easements: Who Is Conserving What for Whom?". Conservation Biology. 18 (1): 65–76. Bibcode:2004ConBi..18...65M. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00401.x. ISSN   0888-8892. S2CID   35032260.
  15. ↑ Reed, Sarah E.; Merenlender, Adina M. (2008-06-28). "Quiet, Nonconsumptive Recreation Reduces Protected Area Effectiveness". Conservation Letters. 1 (3): 146–154. Bibcode:2008ConL....1..146R. doi:10.1111/j.1755-263x.2008.00019.x. ISSN   1755-263X. S2CID   13424093.
  16. ↑ REED, SARAH E.; Merenlender, ADINA M. (2011-02-10). "Effects of Management of Domestic Dogs and Recreation on Carnivores in Protected Areas in Northern California". Conservation Biology. 25 (3): 504–513. Bibcode:2011ConBi..25..504R. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01641.x. ISSN   0888-8892. PMID   21309853. S2CID   15048789.
  17. ↑ "Adina Merenlender: Building a new mode of extension for biodiversity conservation".
  18. ↑ "Leadership Team - UC California Naturalist". calnat.ucanr.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  19. ↑ "About UC Climate Stewards - UC California Naturalist". calnat.ucanr.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  20. ↑ "UC California Naturalist Program launches UC Climate Stewards".
  21. 1 2 Merenlender, Adina; Buhler, Brendan (September 2021). Climate Stewardship. Univ of California Press. ISBN   9780520378940.
  22. ↑ "Society for Conservation Biology | Board of Governors". conbio.org. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  23. ↑ "Ukiah resident Adina Merenlender elected California Academy of Sciences fellow". The Ukiah Daily Journal. 2018-09-15. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  24. ↑ "California Naturalist Program Highlights June 4–24". ANR Blogs.
  25. ↑ "California Naturalist Program Receives National Award". Our Environment at Berkeley.
  26. ↑ "The Society for Conservation Biology". Society for Conservation Biology. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1523-1739 . Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  27. ↑ "PLOS ONE: accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science". journals.plos.org. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  28. ↑ "Corridor Ecology, Second Edition". Island Press. 19 October 2018. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  29. ↑ Nevers, Greg de; Edelman, Deborah Stanger; Merenlender, Adina (February 2013). The California Naturalist Handbook. University of California Press. ISBN   9780520274808.
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