ENHS Speakers for 2025–2026
Talks start at 7:00pm on the dates listed and usually are held in room 221 Allen Hall, University of Oregon campus. See http://eugenenaturalhistorysociety.org/ for updates.
19 September Joe Moll Natural History of Land Trusts
2005 after working mostly with grizzly bears and landowners in Montana and Hokkaido, northern Japan. MRT was established to restore, enhance, and protect robust ecosystems with mosaics of historic habitats and sometimes imperiled wildlife that rely on these systems. Their work encompasses oak savannas, oak woodlands, mixed bottomlands, upland conifer foresst, ash forests, wetlands, wet prairies, and floodplains from the Cascades to the Pacific.
17 October Jamie Cornelius How Birds Adapt to Changing Envirionments
Jamie is an assistant professor at Oregon Statue University. Her research includes investigation of the behavioral and physiological strategies that birds use to cope with unpredictable change in their environments such as storms, fire, drought, environmental contamination, urbanization, and unpredictable or patchy food resources. The goal is to inform conservation efforts, resource management, and policies that can more efficiently and effectively protect our wild birds.
21 November Matt Betts Resaerch Projects at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest
Matt is a professor at Oregon Statu University and lead scientist at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program. His research areas include influences of landscape structure on demography of animal populations, animal movement (particularly dispersal), modeling of population viability and species distributions, trophic cascades in forest ecosystems, socio-political mechanisms that affect forestry, and measurment of landscape change.
12 December Paul Bannick Photography and Woodpeckers
Paul is an award-winning author and wildlife photographer specializing in the natural history of North America with a focus on birds and habitat. Coupling his love of the outdoors with his skill as a photographer, he creates images that foster the intimacy between viewer and subject, inspiring education and conservation. His latest book is Woodpecker: A Year in the Life of North Amerian Woodpeckers and will be available for signing at his lecture.
16 January Marie Tosa Spotted Skunks
Maria is a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University. She became interested in spotted skunks because although they are one of the most abundant carnivores in our forests, little was known about what they eat, how far they move, how they impact the forest, and how forest conditions impact them. The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest provided an ideal space to study these small, nocturnal creatures.
20 February Leif Karlstrom Giant Cascades Aquifer
Leif is an earth scientist at the University of Oregon studying fluid motions in and on volcanoes and glaciers, landscape evolution, and geodynamics. Active projects include the eruption cycle, the Columbia River Flood Basalts, and supraglacial hydrology. Some of his recent wok involves estimation of the size of the Central Oregon aquifer, which supplies the McKenzie and Deschutes Rivers and holds 80 km3 of water. Leif is also a musician and maintains the Volcano Listening Project, which combines volcano music and data sonification tools as a bridge between research and art.
20 March Anne Thompson Marine Microbiology and EcologyAnne is an assistant professor at Portland State University and leads the Microbial Ecology Lab. Her work illuminates the ecology of microorganisms in the Earth’s open oceans and how they contribute to energy and carbon flow on our planet. She has also studied pico cyanobacteria in the Great Lakes. Her work advances microbial oceanography in areas of microbial interactions with predators and symbiotic hosts, trace metal chemistry, microbial physiology, and single-cell gene expression. Her team uses SCUBA, sea-going oceanography, molecular biology, microbiology, and computational biology to understand how the massive populations of microorganisms in the sea make a living.
17 April Heron Brae Oak Savannah Communities
Heron is an experienced botanist, wildcrafter, and rewilder with a demonstrated history of working in professional and community environmental services. She is skilled in teaching, research, community organizing, and inspiration and has 2 decades of experience in field work studying medicinal and edible plants from an ecological and ecocultural perspective.
15 May Samantha Hopkins Paleontology, Climate Change, and Extinction
Samantha is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon and an expert in mass extinction, paleontology, climate change, and evolution. She studies the evolution of ecology in mammals, primarily fossil mammals, and is interested in the role climate change and geologic activity play in mammal evolution. Her lectures can cover the deep time history of climate change on earth, evidence for evolution, conservation biology, and the future of life on earth in the context of human activity.