Biography

I’m a PhD candidate in the UC Davis Ecology graduate program and the Safford lab. Through my research I seek to improve our understanding of how acute (e.g. wildfire) and chronic (e.g. climate) environmental stressors structure ecological communities, how landscape pattern mediates environmental drivers, and how anthropogenic change at local to global scales directly or indirectly alters community dynamics and species distributions. Specifically, my recent work focuses on how wildfire and forest management alters landscape pattern, and influences habitat use of birds and bats in the forests of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.

• zlsteel[at]ucdavis.edu