Our research examines terrestrial social-ecological systems in the context of two globally pressing challenges: climate change and increasing demands for land to accommodate food, fuel, and fiber production for over 8 billion people. How we choose to address these challenges will have far-reaching impacts on ecological processes, biodiversity, and society. Combining remote sensing, field observations, models, and socioeconomic analyses, we integrate theory and methods from ecology, earth science, economics, and land system science to gain new insight into pattern and process across scales in forest ecosystems in the context of global environmental change.

Elsa Ordway, the lab PI, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Co-Director of the Congo Basin Institute and UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research.

If you are interested in joining the lab, we would love to hear from you! Please visit the Join tab to learn more about current opportunities.