Our Coastal Climate:
Climate, Butterflies, and You!

Join us for an afternoon exploration with insect ecologist and professor Matthew Forister, and environmental journalist and author Mary Ellen Hannibal about our changing climate conditions and the impacts on butterfly species (including the western monarch). Learn how you can get involved through community action to support species through habitat enhancement and community science.
Register today to get the Zoom link and reminders.

Matthew Forister, Ph.D.

Matthew Forister is a professor of biology and insect ecology in the Biology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has studied butterflies and other insects in the western US for the last 20 years, and has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters on issues that include insects adapting to exotic plants and butterflies responding to a changing climate. One of the main concerns for Forister and his graduate students is the collection of data at 5 sites in the Sierra Nevada that have been studied for almost 50 years, a project originally started by Art Shapiro of UC Davis. Forister’s talk will include data from that long-term work as well as recent results on warming temperatures associated with butterfly declines throughout our region.

Mary Ellen Hannibal

Mary Ellen Hannibal is an environmental journalist and the author of five books. Among many fellowships and residencies, she is the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science and Society Award and Stanford University’s Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism. Of her book The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save America’s Last, Best Wilderness, Publisher’s Weekly wrote “this is what science writing should be: fascinating and true.” Her most recent book, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction, was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and won a Nautilus book award. She is a creator and writer of “Nature in the City,” a spatio-temporal map of San Francisco, synthesizing more than 40 maps of the terrain and telling stories of change over time. She is a regular contributor to many publications, including The New York Times, Science, Nautilus, and Bay Nature. She is an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Check out her recent TED talk on butterflies and the human soul.