Climate Center Advisory Group
Role of Advisors
The Data Basin Climate Center aims to provide reliable datasets and easy-to-use mapping tools in a central place. The involvement and contribution of experts in the field of climate change is helping us achieve this goal. The Climate Center Advisors contribute in the following ways:
- Develop review criteria for acquiring and prioritizing datasets
- Contribute data or build connections to data providers
- Identify new strategic partnerships or further develop existing alliances
- Critique designs for added features (e.g. new tools, connections to external tools)
- Identify possible funding opportunities
- Identify trends and needs in the community
- Contribute 'guest blogs'
Climate Center 2011 Advisors
Dr. Philip B. Duffy is Chief Scientist at Climate Central, Inc. a non-profit dedicated to increasing public understanding and awareness of climate change. He is also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Prior to this he was a physicist, Group Leader, and Deputy Division Leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Dr. Duffy’s research involved downscaling of climate projections, quantifying uncertainty in projections of future climate, and understanding potential societal impacts of climate change. He has over 60 peer reviewed publications in climate science, atomic physics, and astrophysics. Through his IPCC participation he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2008 he won the LLNL Science and Technology Award and the United Nations Association Global Citizen Award. Dr. Duffy holds a bachelor’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford.
Michael Furniss is a forest hydrologist and soil scientist for the research branch of the Forest Service, with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, located in Arcata in Northwest California. He attempts to work across boundaries, to connect research and practice, multiple disciplines and worldviews, and important knowledge across far flung geographic settings. He is currently leading a national team to develop vulnerability assessment approaches to maintain healthy watersheds, aquatic ecosystems, and water supplies. Michael has developed software and technologies to improve fish passage and low-impact transportation in forest wildland management that has been applied worldwide. He is co-chair of the "Climate Change Resource Center" and lead editor and designer for a recently-released electronic short course on "Adapting to Climate Change" that was produced in a science-management retreat at the Andrews Forest. He is lead author or a recently publication, "Water, Climate Change and Water: Watersehd Stewardship for a Changing Climate" (and is a primary member of the Westwide Climate Initiative Team). Michael is Also currently involved in the exchange of knowledge and technologies for climate adaptation in Vietnam, Israel, and Columbia. He is obsessed with effective communication, and employs new, old, and innovative media to help people to think, feel, and work together.
Dr. Ned Gardiner is a landscape ecologist turned communicator. After earning his doctorate, he committed himself to helping non-scientists use visualized spatial data to understand global change processes occurring in our lifetimes. Dr. Gardiner spent seven years working in high definition video production with the American Museum of Natural History. His tools were data, software, interpretation, and one-on-one contact with researchers publishing peer-reviewed science who shared his interest in broadening the impact of their work by making it sensible to broad audiences. Currently, Dr. Gardiner works as a contractor to NOAA’s Climate Program Office focusing on climate communications through visualization in many contexts, including the NOAA Climate Service Portal and public programming around the country.
Dr. Lisa J. Graumlich joined the University of Washington’s College of the Environment (CoEnv) as its inaugural dean on July 1, 2010. Known for her interdisciplinary research on climate change and her success in fostering innovative partnerships, Graumlich’s vision for the College of the Environment centers on dynamic interdisciplinary teams of scientists building on the world-class research at the University of Washington to strategically engage the grand environmental challenges of our times. Graumlich came to the University of Washington from her position as Director of The University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment (SNRE). At SNRE, Graumlich focused the School’s engagement on challenges in environmental sciences and resource management, and successfully recruited new faculty in emerging fields such as ecological informatics, ecosystem services and ecohydrology. Previously, Graumlich served for six years as the Executive Director of the Big Sky Institute at Montana State University, fostering partnerships between researchers and land managers to develop science-based knowledge on conservation of biodiversity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and otherlarge protected areas. A paleoecologist, Graumlich’s own research investigates how ecosystems and human societies adapt to climate change, with a special focus on severe and persistent drought. She is a frequent speaker on climate change impacts and adaptation, and served as a member of the "Oxburgh Inquiry," an investigative panel convened by the University of East Anglia to review the stolen e-mails which led to the"Climategate" controversy. Most recently, Graumlich testified before the U.S. House of Representative Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on long-term climate variability.
Dr. Healy Hamilton is a biodiversity scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and adjunct professor in the Department of Geography at San Francisco State University. She is the founding director of the Center for Biodiversity Research, a program that integrates biological and geospatial data for biodiversity research, conservation and education. Dr. Hamilton and the staff at CBR conduct research into species response to climate change and make it available for large landscape conservation planning. CBR produces multiple downscaled climate datasets under alternative climate change scenarios, as well as geographic range shift models for ecologically important species. Additionally, CBR is producing an index of ‘climate turnover’ to upload into Data Basin – a measure of the predicted overall shift from current climate regimes based on a large ensemble of global climate models. Data Basin has partnered with CBR to host and disseminate CBR’s maps of climate turnover, downscaled climate surfaces, and modeled outputs of predicted species range shifts.
Dr. Lara J. Hansen, co-founder, chief scientist and executive director of EcoAdapt, focuses her work on facilitating incorporation of the reality of climate change into the daily practice of conservation and resource management. She is the lead author of a key text on the issue of natural system adaptation to climate change, Buying Time: A User's Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. This manual lead to the development of an engaged stakeholder process (known as Climate Camp) to help resource managers create adaptation strategies applicable to their work. Work at EcoAdapt focuses on helping to develop the field of climate change adaptation and supporting the implementation of adaptation measures to make all of our efforts more robust in the face of climate change. To facilitate this process EcoAdapt, in partnership with Island Press, is developing the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE), your online adaptation destination, being launched 4 July 2010. She is co-author of a new text on climate change adaptation, Climate Savvy: Adapting Conservation and Resource Management to a Changing World. She serves on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is a Switzer Environmental Fellow and a United States Environmental Protection Agency Bronze Medalist.
Dr. Rebecca Shaw, Associate State Director for Conservation, is responsible for overseeing all conservation projects in The Nature Conservancy’s California Program. She joined The Nature Conservancy in March 2002 to lead the Invasive Species Initiative in California and continued on as Director of Conservation Science from November 2002 to 2007. Prior to joining The Nature Conservancy, she conducted research at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University on the impacts of climate change. Dr. Shaw has published numerous articles, including several in the leading journals Science and Nature, and has won numerous fellowships for her research. She is a lead author for Working Group II of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report focused on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability and was a member of Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Climate Adaptation Advisory Panel. She holds an M.A. in environmental policy and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from U.C. Berkeley.
