Institute for Natural Resources

B.A. Biology-Environmental Studies, Whitman College, 2003
PhD Ecology, Utah State University, 2009

Megan is an ecologist and leads INR’s Rangeland Sustainability Program. She is interested in bridging the gap between science and management by working with managers and practitioners to identify and break down communication barriers, providing maps and tools to access data and information, and facilitating discussions of how to incorporate science-based information into decision-making processes. Prior to her current work, she spent several years working on large landscape assessments across diverse ecosystems in the western United States. Megan has been working with the INR team since 2010 after moving to Portland from Utah, where she studied the ecological effects of genetic variation in quaking aspen populations as a doctoral student.

Major Rangeland Sustainability Program projects:

Promoting collaboration and providing technical tools and support to conserve the sagebrush steppe in southeastern Oregon through the SageCon Partnership.

Collecting monitoring data on the status and trends of public rangelands in the Great Basin through the Bureau of Land Management’s Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring program. INR AIM leads: Michael Russell and Caitlin Lawrence.

Products, web resources, and outreach materials:

INR has developed several SageCon decision support tools to facilitate coordinated planning in southeastern Oregon through the Oregon Explorer platform.

Synthesis maps to guide management include ecostate time series maps of change in rangeland condition and geographic strategy maps for landscape-scale management of invasive annual grasses.

The SageCon Dashboard provides information on the status, trends, and actions of the SageCon Partnership.

A compilation of technical resources for rangeland assessment and management includes information about rangeland vegetation maps sources, guidance for evaluating and summarizing maps, examples of using decision support tools in rangeland management, and more resources.