Dexter Locke

Urban foresters manage what they can measure, assess, and evaluate. Technological improvements in urban remote sensing, the widespread adoption geographic information systems, and developments in information management systems more broadly are changing the way people and manage woody vegetation. An additional layer of complexity is the array of stakeholder groups (i.e. Parks Departments, community groups, Offices of Sustainability, Planning Departments, urban forestry NGOs, and others), and their overlapping and/or competing interests. Data and maps can form a basis for collaboration. Spatial data on urban forest cover and condition may also reveal environmental injustice, further motivating action to ameliorate uneven outcomes.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Dexter Locke focuses on actionable, transdisciplinary, team science and working with urban natural resource managers his passion. He has degrees in Natural Resources Planning (University of Vermont), Environmental Science (Yale School of Environment), and Geography (Clark University). His research focuses on the world’s fastest changing ecosystems, where the dominant species is Homo sapiens: urban ecosystems. He has growing interests in synthesis, meta-science, open data, reproducibility, and replication. When not studying urban forests or programming in R and Python, he can be found volunteering with urban forestry groups in Maryland where he lives.