My name is Travis Longcore. I am an environmental scientist and urban ecologist. Since the mid-1990s, I have studied, restored, protected, and enjoyed nature in and around cities, with a foot in both applied and academic worlds. I am an adjunct member of the faculty at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability where I serve as Senior Associate Director and co-chair the professional doctoral program in Environmental Science and Engineering (D.Env.). For applied projects, I am the Science Director of The Urban Wildlands Group (nonprofit) and as a consultant, I work in ecological restoration, as an advisor design professionals in architecture and landscape architecture, and with attorneys to secure land protection. And apparently the most noticeable thing about me is that I am “tall, with an unpruned thatch of brown hair.”
The world is experiencing two intersecting trends that define life in the 21st century. First, in the ongoing biodiversity crisis species are being lost at a rate matched only by the previous five mass extinction spasms of deep history. Second, human settlement is concentrating in cities at a rate unprecedented in history, with urban life defining human experience on most continents. My work is based on the premise that these two trends are related, deserve to be understood, and are inherently spatial in nature — questions about the distribution of phenomena on the Earth that can be better understood and managed with the support of spatial analysis, at scales from the site to the neighborhood, city, watershed, region, and globe.
That has meant tracing how artificial light reshapes animal behavior and physiology, reconstructing the historical ecology of landscapes that cities have paved over or forgotten, working to recover endangered butterflies and birds in the middle of dense urban regions, and — more recently — asking what wildfire and a changing climate mean for the places we’ve built and the species we share them with.
Welcome to the website, and please explore the research topics, audio and video of media appearances, and upcoming appearances. News items are found in the updates.
Contact
email: longcore@ucla.edu
bsky: @travislongcore