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| Name |
Franklin, Janet |
| Location
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San Diego State University |
| Primary Field
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Human Environmental Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Environmental Sciences and Ecology |
 Election Citation
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Franklin has significantly advanced our understanding of human impacts on ecosystems by developing novel species distribution models, combined with innovative geospatial analysis and extensive field work. She has gained new insights into the impact of fire regimes on ecosystems services and the role of early humans in shaping ecological communities. |
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Research Interests
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Janet Franklin studies the patterns and dynamics of terrestrial plant communities at the landscape scale. Plant communities are important elements of regional biodiversity and provide essential habitat for individual species. She has done field work in California, the American Southwest, West Africa, South Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean. As a geographer her work often focuses on describing spatial patterns and inferring underlying pattern-generating processes via simulation modeling, natural and designed experiments, and other approaches. She is recognized for her expertise in species distribution modeling, a methodology that associates observations of a biotic response variable such as species occurrence with environmental predictors, resulting in a spatial prediction of habitat suitability. Her research addresses the impacts of natural disturbance and human-caused landscape change on ecosystems and biodiversity, and has provided insights about synergistic impacts of global change factors on biodiversity. Land use change, altered disturbance regimes, climate change, and invasive species operate at the scale of landscapes and regions, leading to ecosystem change, habitat loss and species decline. Only by considering these factors together can it be determined which factors may amplify effects of others (for example urban growth and climate change), and where. |
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