Naturalist Nights 2016 | Dr. Jill Baron, Ph.D.
For many of us, the mountains are treasured places, yet they are experiencing changes seemingly beyond our control. In addition to climate change, atmospheric nitrogen deposition poses a threat to biodiversity and water quality. In this talk Dr. Baron will summarize more than 30 years of what we have learned about nitrogen in the environment, including an update on lakes around Aspen. She will also describe how Colorado and the EPA are trying to fix the problem.
Dr. Jill S. Baron is an ecosystem ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and a Senior Research Ecologist with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. Her interests include applying ecosystem concepts to management of human-dominated regions, and understanding the biogeochemical and ecological effects of climate change and atmospheric nitrogen deposition to mountain ecosystems. Baron is a Fellow of and was President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in 2014. She is active in US National Climate Assessment efforts, and has given testimony to Congress on western acid rain and climate change issues. She is founder of the Loch Vale Watershed long-term monitoring and research program in Rocky Mountain National Park, an instrumented catchment with 33 years of inquiry into climate dynamics and biogeochemical cycling. She is founder and Co-Director of the John Wesley Powell Center for Earth System Science Analysis and Synthesis, which fosters the emergence of new knowledge from interdisciplinary collaboration. Baron is Director of the North American Nitrogen Initiative and on several advisory panels including for the Institute for Alpine Environment and the Science policy Exchange.
Naturalist Nights are brought to you through a partnership between Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, Wilderness Workshop, and Roaring Fork Audubon.
