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Introduction:
Heather Leslie is the Peggy and Henry D. Sharpe Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology. Dr. Leslie conducts research on the ecology, policy, and management of coastal marine ecosystems. A member of the Brown faculty since July 2007, Dr. Leslie received an A.B. in Biology from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Oregon State University. Before arriving at Brown, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Environmental Institute. Dr. Leslie’s work has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology, Conservation Biology, and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and has been covered by the New York Times and the Environmental News Service. She is editing the first book on marine ecosystem-based management, which will be published by Island Press in spring 2009.
One major focus of her research is how spatial variation in nearshore ocean conditions and other environmental conditions impacts the fitness of rocky shore organisms. Understanding this variability can help inform conservation and management of marine systems in the face of climate change and more local-scale perturbations. She also has investigated how spatially explicit conservation planning tools can be used to integrate knowledge of human-environment interactions in marine systems. A developing area of research focuses on such planning tools may be used to visualize the distribution of marine ecosystem services (e.g. seafood provision and protection from coastal storms) on a seascape scale and to assess potential tradeoffs among them in order to inform more ecosystem-based approaches to ocean management. |
