Climate Resilience Scientist
Climate & Land Use
[email protected]
Piper is the Climate Resilience Scientist for The Nature Conservancy’s California Chapter, providing science leadership to the Climate Program. Her work focuses on integrating nature into climate resilience planning, adaptation, and mitigation. Her work occurs at the intersection of ecological and socio-economic resilience and is centered on increasing resilience to climate change disasters such as sea level rise, wildfires, and floods through assessing vulnerabilities to climate change, developing nature-based solutions, and strategic land use.
Prior to joining TNC, Piper was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles focusing on predicting species distributions in relation to changing environments. She received her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine where her research focused on climate-driven range shifts. Piper earned MS degrees from the University of California, Irvine and Northeastern University and a BA in environmental studies and journalism from New York University.
What Piper is working on now:
I am currently working on projects to assess climate change vulnerability and to increase community resilience in California by assessing land use and conservation patterns. I am also developing a database to identify and track range-shifting species in California.