Tamara’s broad research interests include how land use and land cover change, both historic and projected, influence regional environmental processes while identifying the local and non-local drivers of those changes.
Her graduate training at the University of Arizona was in the fields of biogeography, climatology, climate change, paleoclimate, and paleoecology. With her experience examining natural archives of paleo-environmental landscape change, she was able to make the leap to utilizing modern remote sensing based records to examine climate and human-derived landscape level changes and their associated impacts. Her recent work utilizes historic land change records to inform model scenarios of future land change and their potential impacts on natural resources, including habitat and water availability.
Recently, Tamara has expanded her land change scenarios work in California to estimate future land-use related water demand under various land use futures. This work has grown to include funding from California's Strategic Growth Council for examining future water demand in groundwater dependent regions along California's Central Coast. In addition, her modeling work is being used to map future projections of flooded agricultural lands in the Central Valley as part of the NASA Ecoforecasting project, examining the availability of wildlife and migratory bird habitat under varying land use and climate scenarios. This effort involves integrated modeling between a streamflow, runoff, water demand, and water supply model which identifies flooded habitats by land use and land cover type and basin and translating this for use in the spatially explicit LUCAS land change model.
As recently appointed Deputy Director of the National Innovation Center, Tamara is working to expand the reach of the center, helping to forge new and exciting partnerships between USGS scientists and other public, private, academic, and non-profit parties. She is working to develop regional and national communication pipelines as well as coordinating science seminars and workshops to introduce the latest technological advancements in earth science and explore their use in the federal science portfolio.
Science and Products
National Innovation Center Seminar Series
Fifth Federal UxS Workshop
Pacific Region Colloquium
The Pacific Region Colloquium, founded in February 1996 as the Western Region Colloquium, was a monthly speaker series that spanned the spectrum of earth and environmental science.
Land use and tsunami hazards in the Pacific Northwest
California land-change projections
Land change and water use in Mediterranean California
Threats to protected areas
Land Use and Climate Change Team
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National Innovation Center Seminar Series
This bi-weekly seminar series is an opportunity to present innovation successes and prospects across USGS Mission Areas. It is a forum for our scientists and partners to learn about existing and potential innovative technologies to help fill known observation gaps, as well as to present cutting edge research and technology opportunities which could be leveraged to advance USGS science through...Fifth Federal UxS Workshop
Welcome Back! The Federal UxS community returns to in-person meetings to explore new opportunities, and plenty of challenges, together. The overarching goal of the workshop is to approach UxS challenges with a whole-of-Government team, leveraging successes within our Agencies to accelerate our national UxS enterprise and focus group resources on shared expertise and new opportunities. Mark your...Pacific Region Colloquium
The Pacific Region Colloquium, founded in February 1996 as the Western Region Colloquium, was a monthly speaker series that spanned the spectrum of earth and environmental science.
Land use and tsunami hazards in the Pacific Northwest
Tsunamis have the potential to cause considerable damage to communities along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coastline. As coastal communities expand over time, the potential societal impact of tsunami inundation changes.To understand how community exposure to tsunami hazards may change in coming decades, we projected future development (i.e. urban, residential, and rural), households, and residents...California land-change projections
This dataset consists of modeled projections of land use and land cover and population for the State of California for the period 1970-2101. For the 1970-2001 period, we used the USGS's LUCAS model to "backcast" LULC, beginning with the 2001 initial conditions and ending with 1970. For future projections, the model was initialized in 2001 and run forward on an annual time step to 2100. In total 5...Land change and water use in Mediterranean California
Water shortages in California are a growing concern amidst ongoing drought, earlier spring snowmelt, projected future climate warming, and currently mandated water-use restrictions. Increases in population and land use in coming decades will place additional pressure on already limited available water supplies.We used a state-and-transition simulation model to project future changes in developed...Threats to protected areas
Land-use intensification poses significant threats to biodiversity both directly through the alteration and fragmentation of ecosystems and habitat loss, and indirectly through the disruption of supporting ecological processes. While protected areas offer refugia for species and ecosystems, they do not function in isolation from surrounding natural, working, or human-dominated landscapes.Protected...Land Use and Climate Change Team
We are a research team focusing on understanding the rates, causes, and consequences of land change across a range of geographic and temporal scales. Our emphasis is on developing alternative future projections and quantifying the impact on environmental systems, in particular, the role of land-use change on ecosystem carbon dynamics.We are interested in how land-use and climate systems will... - Data
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