Recently retired conservation biologist at the University of California Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology. My focus was and continues to be on the deserts of North America, their unacknowledged high levels of biodiversity, and anthropogenic impacts of habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and climate change. While I am interested in all that nature offers, reptiles, and specifically lizards have been my main research topics.

Unfortunately, natural history has become an increasingly lost discipline in through out much of academia. It has been my goal to keep natural history alive and relevant. To that end, I continue to teach a 10 week "California Naturalist" course each spring, focused on the California Deserts and open to anyone from 18 to 100 (or older). Part of that class introduces the students to iNaturalist and how their observations can become part of published scientific research. Even after the class ends, those students that have the time and energy participate in bi-weekly surveys of lizards across the elevation gradients that the deserts and "sky island" mountains provide. Through those surveys we see year to year up-slope shifts in many of the lizard species