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Student Spotlight: Danielle Svehla Christianson
Student Spotlight Directory
Danielle Svehla Christianson, ERG PhD student.
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Danielle co-authored Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs, an innovative field guide to the plants occurring in the major Southern Californian watershed.
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PHOTO/S. RICHMOND
Danielle prepares to scan the Red Fir forest with ground-based LiDAR. |
"Scaling climate change and visualizing complexities"
December 2009
The Energy and Resources Group (ERG) offers a supportive and exciting environment in which to address the most challenging and pressing issues facing Earth. It is this relevancy of research combined with an interdisciplinary approach and community of passionate researchers that attracted Danielle to ERG.
Motivated by her concern for the ability of human culture to persist sustainably within the natural world, Danielle pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda: 1) testing the relevance of large-scale climate models to forest dynamics and 2) exploring new ways to explain complex topics visually. The latter is the focus of her ERG master's project Catching the Public Eye: The Promise of Visual Communication in Science Knowledge and Awareness (2007). In it, she explores the potential efficacy of innovative visualizations that she developed for Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs versus the visual techniques of other widely used natural history texts. Danielle plans to continue investigating visual communication in her PhD research. She is seeking new techniques to illustrate often-forgotten yet fundamental dependencies between human society and the natural world, as well as new techniques to explain complex science concepts. One such technique is ground-based LiDAR, which she used to create a 3-D model of her ecological study site in the Sierra Nevada. She is also developing automated on-line data quality visualizations for the Alpine Treeline Warming Experiment, a climate change study in the Rocky Mountains. In addition to her academic focus on visual communication, Danielle and fellow ERGies founded Climate Change Communicators, a campus-wide working group focused on improving communication of climate change between scientists and the public. She is also leading communication efforts for the student-founded Strawberry Creek Native Plant Garden and Nursery.
In her ecological research, Danielle is conducting a climate-vegetation study in the red fir forests of the Sierra Nevada. At her field site in Sequoia National Park, she is measuring environmental variables at small spatial scales. These data coupled with the locations of tree seedlings will allow for the assessment of the microenvironments best
suited for seedling establishment, if any, at the relevant spatial scale. Additionally, these data will allow for examination of how well large-scale averages of environmental factors used in climate models represent the microenvironments best suited for seedling establishment. Finally, with temporal changes in these data, Danielle will be able to gain insight into how the available microenvironments may change under projected future climates. She will also experimentally address this question using microenvironmental data from the Alpine Treeline Warming Experiment, in which infrared heaters are warming different sites in the subalpine forest and in the alpine above treeline.
This project seeks to inform future management of California's natural resources that are influenced by the distribution of forest vegetation; such resources include fresh water from the Sierran snowpack, timber species, and biodiversity. Better projections of how vegetation will change under possible future climates enable improved estimates of future resource availability. Thus, we can better assess the impacts to communities and the importance of climate change mitigation, as well as plan for adaptation. Danielle's research on spatial scales in vegetation-climate interactions will specifically improve projections of future vegetation change. Additionally, her work will contribute to the theoretical understanding of mechanisms that influence the spatial distribution of plant species.
Danielle completed her undergraduate studies at Texas A&M University, where she graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. Before coming to ERG, she worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designing miniature chemical sensors for extraterrestrial life detection on Mars and Europa. She then studied natural history with retired UC Riverside herbarium founder Oscar F. Clarke and later worked in the Marin Headlands for fellow-ERGie Laurie Koteen on effects of invasive grasses on carbon and water cycling. In her free time, Danielle enjoys windsurfing with her husband, cycling the Berkeley hills with buddies, knitting and quilting, reading science fiction, and spending time with friends.
Danielle is very grateful for the opportunity to engage in projects that will hopefully benefit society along side of the dedicated and amazingly supportive ERG community. Her studies with John Harte, the Harte Lab, and Margaret Torn have been especially enriching both intellectually and personally. She is especially grateful to her field assistant Sarah Richmond for her dedication and enthusiasm. Danielle has also received the help of several individuals and organizations outside of ERG including Lara Kueppers at UC Merced, the USGS Western Ecological Research Center, Sequoia National Park, the Berkeley Atmospheric Science Center, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Program. Last but not least, the support and encouragement of her husband and family have made this venture into academia sustainable.
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