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Tamara Wilson

Tamara’s broad research interests include how climate and land use change, both historic and projected, influence regional environmental processes and resource availability. Her scenario research identifies climate change impacts and feedbacks on land use, protected areas, water availability, ecosystems, and habitat sustainability. 

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.

As Deputy Director of the National Innovation Center, Tamara works 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. 

Tamara is currently on detail with the Department of the Interior working to craft policy and implementation guidance for Nature-based Solutions. 

*Disclaimer: Listing outside positions with professional scientific organizations on this Staff Profile are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an endorsement of those professional scientific organizations or their activities by the USGS, Department of the Interior, or U.S. Government