I am the Director of Science for Climate and Land Use in the California Chapter of The Nature Conservancy. My background is in ecosystem ecology and soil ecology, and I have a Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

I studied nitrogen cycling in California grasslands for my dissertation, but I have also conducted research on predator olfaction in prairie ecosystems in Kansas, climate change in the Scandinavian Arctic, and soil cation exchange capacity in Cape Cod forests.

At The Nature Conservancy, I provide science leadership and expertise to our Climate Program, which operates statewide and collaborates with other TNC chapters in the West and across the US. I am currently working on developing some written products related to the importance of natural lands conservation as a natural climate solution.

You may be interested in my publications: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-parker-621147b/, especially this one:

Parker S.S., G.B. Pauly, J. Moore, N.S. Fraga, J.J. Knapp, Z. Principe, B.V. Brown, J.M. Randall, B.S. Cohen, T.A. Wake. 2018. Adapting the bioblitz to meet conservation needs. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13103