American geographer and landscape ecologist
Janet Franklin (born July 8, 1959 in Frankfurt, Germany[1]) is an American geographer, botanist, and landscape ecologist. Her work is centered on the use of remote sensing to model and understand vegetated landscapes. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biogeography in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside.[2]
Early life and education
Franklin grew up near San Francisco.[1] She received a B.A. in Environmental Biology from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1979. Subsequently, she received a master's degree from UCSB in Geography in 1983, and finally a PhD from the same institution in 1988.[3] Her thesis focused on the remote sensing of woody vegetation structures in Mali.[4][5]
Career
Franklin received her start in remote sensing as a doctoral candidate when she was recruited by a professor on the basis of her ability to distinguish different species of pine tree from aerial photographs.[6]
In 1988, Franklin began teaching and researching at San Diego State University, where she remained until 2009. Her 1995 paper, Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modeling of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients, is considered a foundational work of modern, remote sensing-based landscape ecology. In 2009, she was appointed as a professor of geography at Arizona State University, becoming a Regent's Professor in 2015.[7] From 2014 to 2016, she was president of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology.[1] Some of her research has focused on island ecosystems in the West Indies and Polynesia. In 2017, she was appointed to the University of California Riverside.[2]
Franklin's work focuses on the use of remote sensing techniques to model and understand vegetated landscapes.[6] She has made significant contributions to the study of human-caused landscape change and predictive vegetation mapping.[8][9] In recent years, much of her work has focused on climate change, both present and historical.[10][11][12]
Franklin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences[1] and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also the current editor-in-chief of Diversity & Distributions, a highly ranked journal on conservation biogeography.
Selected works
Franklin is the author of one book and over 120 peer-reviewed academic papers.[3]
- Book
- Franklin, Janet. Mapping species distributions: spatial inference and prediction. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Articles
- Franklin, Janet. "Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modellng of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients." Progress in physical geography 19, no. 4 (1995)
- Franklin, Janet. "Predicting the distribution of shrub species in southern California from climate and terrain‐derived variables." Journal of Vegetation Science 9, no. 5 (1998)
- Franklin, Janet. "Moving beyond static species distribution models in support of conservation biogeography." Diversity and Distributions 16, no. 3 (2010)
- Franklin, Janet, et al. "Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine scale do climate projections need to be?." Global change biology 19.2 (2013)
