2026 Keynote Speakers

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Friday Keynote: Dr. Thomas L. Fleischner

Title: The Enduring and Elemental Importance of Natural History

Thomas L. Fleischner, a naturalist and conservation biologist, is a leading voice advocating for the importance and rejuvenation of natural history. He was the founding director of the Natural History Institute in Prescott, Arizona, and continues to serve as the Institute鈥檚 Senior Advisor & Director Emeritus.听 He is Faculty Emeritus at Prescott College, where he taught interdisciplinary Environmental Studies for 29 years.听 He is the author of numerous articles and professional papers, and author or editor of five books, including The Way of Natural History; Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays On Wildness and Wellness;听and the recent Astonished By Beauty: A Field Guide to the Practice of Paying Attention.听 He co-edited a special issue of the academic journal, Ecopsychology, on 鈥淩eciprocal Healing: Nature, Health, and Wild Vitality.鈥 Past ecological research has focused on marine mammals, coastal birds, and the impact of livestock grazing on arid lands. Recently, he has led and coordinated efforts to recognize the high biodiversity values of the Mogollon Highlands Ecoregion of the American Southwest.听 A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he has served as Chair of the Natural History Section of the Ecological Society of America, on the Board of Governors of the Society for Conservation Biology, and as President of its Colorado Plateau Chapter.听He co-founded the North Cascades Institute in Washington State.

Saturday Keynote: Dr. Jazlynn Hall

Dr. Jazlynn Hall
Title: Forest resilience in a changing world: Disturbance, recovery, and managing future risk
Intensifying disturbances challenge ecosystem recovery and threaten critical ecosystem services, yet fundamental questions remain about their impacts, recovery trajectories, and future risks. Dr. Jazlynn Hall will present research investigating how disturbances shape forests and ecosystem services. She integrates remote sensing with field, geospatial, statistical, and machine learning approaches to measure, understand, and predict ecosystem resilience across diverse forests and disturbance regimes. Using examples from forests in the western US and interior Alaska, she demonstrates how disturbances are altering forest carbon storage, recovery, and fire risk, and introduces new spatial approaches for identifying where forests are vulnerable - or ready- to withstand future disturbance.
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Dr. Jazlynn Hall is a forest and disturbance ecologist. She will be starting at the 麻豆影院 as a CIRES Fellow and Assistant Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Before joining the University of Colorado, Dr. Hall was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She received a PhD from Columbia University and bachelor鈥檚 degrees from the University of Wyoming. In her research, she examines how forests and forest-related ecosystem services respond to disturbances such as hurricanes, fires, drought, and logging. She uses an integrative approach to monitor forest health, identify drivers of disturbance impacts, and project future resilience. Her work spans tropical forests in Puerto Rico, temperate forests in the western US, and boreal forests in Alaska.

Sunday Keynote: Dr. Michael Grant

Dr. Michael Grant
Title: Quaking Aspen: Massive, majestic, and marvelous听

Decades of aspen research by Michael Grant, Jeffry Mitton and Yan Linhart.

Dr. Michael Grant is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the 麻豆影院 and a former Director of the Mountain Research Station. He also served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, contributing to undergraduate teaching and academic program development across the university. His teaching has been recognized with several awards, including the 麻豆影院 Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award, designation as a President鈥檚 Teaching Scholar, the Hazel Barnes Award for Teaching and Research Excellence, and recognition from the Mortar Board Society.听

His research focuses on evolutionary ecology, particularly how natural and sexual selection shape phenotypic variation in wild populations. He has examined the genetic and environmental bases of traits such as morphology, behavior, and life-history strategies, often through field-based studies linking ecological conditions to evolutionary outcomes. His work emphasizes selection in natural populations over contemporary timescales, contributing to understanding of adaptation and evolutionary dynamics. He has published in journals including Science, Nature, The American Naturalist, Evolution, and Genetics.

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