2026 Keynote Speakers

Friday Keynote: Dr. Thomas L. Fleischner

Title: The Enduring and Elemental Importance of Natural History

Thomas L. Fleischner, a naturalist and conservation biologist, is a leading voice advocating for the importance and rejuvenation of natural history. He was the founding director of the Natural History Institute in Prescott, Arizona, and continues to serve as the Institute’s Senior Advisor & Director Emeritus. He is Faculty Emeritus at Prescott College, where he taught interdisciplinary Environmental Studies for 29 years. He is the author of numerous articles and professional papers, and author or editor of five books, including The Way of Natural History; Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays On Wildness and Wellness; and the recent Astonished By Beauty: A Field Guide to the Practice of Paying Attention. He co-edited a special issue of the academic journal, Ecopsychology, on “Reciprocal Healing: Nature, Health, and Wild Vitality.” Past ecological research has focused on marine mammals, coastal birds, and the impact of livestock grazing on arid lands. Recently, he has led and coordinated efforts to recognize the high biodiversity values of the Mogollon Highlands Ecoregion of the American Southwest. A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he has served as Chair of the Natural History Section of the Ecological Society of America, on the Board of Governors of the Society for Conservation Biology, and as President of its Colorado Plateau Chapter. He co-founded the North Cascades Institute in Washington State.

Saturday Keynote: Dr. Jazlynn Hall

Title: Forest resilience in a changing world: Disturbance, recovery, and managing future risk

Intensifying disturbances challenge ecosystem recovery and threaten critical ecosystem services, yet fundamental questions remain about their impacts, recovery trajectories, and future risks. Dr. Jazlynn Hall will present research investigating how disturbances shape forests and ecosystem services. She integrates remote sensing with field, geospatial, statistical, and machine learning approaches to measure, understand, and predict ecosystem resilience across diverse forests and disturbance regimes. Using examples from forests in the western US and interior Alaska, she demonstrates how disturbances are altering forest carbon storage, recovery, and fire risk, and introduces new spatial approaches for identifying where forests are vulnerable - or ready- to withstand future disturbance.

Dr. Jazlynn Hall is a forest and disturbance ecologist. She will be starting at the University of Colorado Boulder as a CIRES Fellow and Assistant Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Before joining the University of Colorado, Dr. Hall was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She received a PhD from Columbia University and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Wyoming. In her research, she examines how forests and forest-related ecosystem services respond to disturbances such as hurricanes, fires, drought, and logging. She uses an integrative approach to monitor forest health, identify drivers of disturbance impacts, and project future resilience. Her work spans tropical forests in Puerto Rico, temperate forests in the western US, and boreal forests in Alaska.

Sunday Keynote: Dr. Jeff Mitton

Title: Quaking Aspen: Massive, majestic, and marvelous

Collaborative research on aspen by Michael Grant, Jeff Mitton and Yan Linhart--summing to 125 years in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Mitton's research focuses on the degree to which natural selection shapes differences among populations distributed among differing habits, such as elevational gradients for aspen and ponderosa pine or positions in the intertidal zone for mussels. He has published evidence of natural selection in killifish, blue mussels, ribbed mussels, American eels, ponderosa pine, mountain pine beetles, Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, white fir, limber pine, tiger salamanders, honeybees, perennial ryegrass, piñon pine and quaking aspen.

Many of studies above were incorporated into his book, 1997, "Selection in Natural Populations," Oxford University Press.

He hosted 4 national scientific meetings for the Society for the Study of Evolution, Genetics Society of America, American Society of Naturalists and Society of Systematic Biology.

From 2000 to present Mitton has written a column describing the natural history of the plants and animals encountered while hiking in Colorado and in the red rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau. To date, 464 columns have appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera and the University of Colorado's Arts and Sciences Magazine.

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