Improved Forest Management: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

Dr. Brown holds cross-sector expertise in ecosystem restoration, vegetation ecology, conservation planning, carbon measurement, and natural climate solutions. Before joining Relae, she worked extensively in natural resources management, and led research teams in a variety of capacities, including mapping and helping designate conservation targets in the northern Brazilian Atlantic Forest and developing oak woodland restoration plans in coastal California. She has worked on land-based carbon projects in the forests of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania and the United States. Dr. Brown holds a Ph.D. from the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) Department at UC Berkeley and conducted post-doctoral work in Brazil. Her graduate work was supported by a 5-year grant from the USDA-Forest Service. Dr. Brown currently teaches at UC Berkeley. She is also a Fulbright Scholar.

Dr. Gutierrez is an environmental and climate justice practitioner, drawing on work across community-based research, public policy, and direct climate advocacy. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and political ecologist, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with environmental justice movements in Chile, rural northern California, and the Puget Sound on topics of watershed conservation and Indigenous sovereignty, renewable energy development, superfund remediation, and floodplain restoration. Alongside his work at Relae, he is affiliate faculty at the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, where he teaches and conducts research on the environmental justice dimensions of climate change adaptation.

Prior to joining Relae, Grant served as an environmental justice policy lead in state and local government in Washington, where he led efforts to implement the HEAL Act—Washington’s landmark environmental justice law—and advance equitable development and community planning through the Duwamish Valley Program at the City of Seattle. He serves on the board of the Duwamish River Community Coalition, a community-based organization focused on environmental justice and climate resilience in South Seattle.

Prior to joining Relae Adam was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Davis where he used a state-of-the-art mechanistic vegetation model to predict how California's forests will respond to changing management, fire regimes, and climate. Adam earned his PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley where he improved the representation of ecological processes in the vegetation components of Earth System Models. During his PhD Adam was also funded by NASA to use remote sensing to understand what drives post-fire forest regeneration outcomes in California.

Prior to his graduate work, Adam worked for an agriculture technology company called Terviva where he focused on the science and commercialization of a sustainable tree crop called pongamia. Adam received his BA in Environmental Science from Pitzer College.

Logan Sander uses his experience in forest management, biodiversity and forest tenure to apply an interdisciplinary approach to his work. Before joining Relae, Logan worked extensively in natural resources management. His early work included conducting vegetation surveys throughout Alaska for the USDA-NRCS and supporting projects to address deforestation in Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He later conducted agroforestry research and fieldwork in Jamaica and Sri Lanka. Subsequently, as a consulting forester, Logan provided forest management expertise to landowners in the Pacific Northwest. Most recently, he was a researcher on diverse projects supporting community forestry and collective forest tenure for clients such as the World Bank, Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, FAO, and private foundations. Logan has extensive field experience in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and New England, Morocco, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sri Lanka.