Lauren Cox, PhD, is a contractor for the Forest and Agriculture team at Spatial Informatics Group, providing science support for the Million Acre Strategy and Planscape projects. With a background in environmental science and geography, she specializes in forest ecology and management. Her research seeks to understand how natural disturbances and anthropogenic perturbations interact to shape temperate forest dynamics. Recently, she has focused on evaluating the efficacy of silvicultural treatments in the Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forest, with management objectives ranging from severe wildfire prevention to timber production to carbon sequestration.

From 2017 – 2021, she collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to survey the drought-related tree mortality throughout California. Additionally, from 2018-2023, she was involved with the development of the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Experiment, a broad-scale, replicated experiment using silvicultural treatments designed to increase the resistance, resilience, and adaptive capacity of mixed-conifer forests.

Lauren holds a doctorate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley. She also holds an MS in Geography and a BS in Environmental Science.