Danielle LeFer is a Natural Resource Program Manager for the California Department of Parks and Recreation – Angeles District. She is part of a team that manages the natural resources for 40,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, Simi Hills, the San Fernando Valley, the Verdugo Mountains and downtown Los Angeles. She has over 20 years of experience in natural resource management, research, and restoration. Along with this, Danielle serves as a member of the La Kretz Science Advisory Committee. Danielle’s research has focused on fire ecology and water bird conservation. Danielle earned a B.A. in Environmental Science from Barnard College, an M.S. in Ecology and Systematics from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in Wildlife Science from Virginia Tech.

I am primarily interested in the distributions, abundances and interactions of pelagic marine organisms. The open sea is a vast three-dimensional environment, seemingly homogeneous and thinly populated when compared to benthic or terrestrial habitats, yet pelagic animals everywhere routinely occur in local aggregations at densities that exceed by far the population sizes estimated by traditional oceanographic techniques. Most of the interesting events in the sea occur within or near these aggregations, and we attempt to understand the causes for their formation and the subsequent dynamics of the organisms. My research concerns both physical and behavioral factors that generate and maintain these aggregations. 1.We investigate fine-scale physical and chemical structure of the sea in order to understand how pelagic animals respond to subtle differences in the water column. In particular we examine how eddies, fronts, shear zones, thermoclines, Langmuir cells and odor trails generate patchy distributions of pelagic organisms. Currently we are investigating these phenomena off the coast of southern California via UCLA research vessels and in the isolated marine lakes of Palau in the western tropical Pacific. 2.We examine the ecological role of behavior in plankton and in fishes in the open ocean via SCUBA in the upper ocean and via submersibles and remotely operated vehicles (ROVS) in the deep sea. We have conducted behavioral studies in the Antarctic, the Gulf of California, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. In situ research is supplemented with laboratory studies of planktonic animals and fishes maintained in specially designed aquariums.

Jann Vendetti is the Twila Bratcher Chair in Malacological (= molluscan) Research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and an adjunct professor of biology at Glendale Community College. Jann is interested in land snail systematics and their modern and historical biodiversity in greater Southern California. She oversees the SLIME (Snails and slugs Living in Metropolitan Environments) project on iNaturalist and works with volunteer citizen scientists to understand the ranges of native and introduced species and the influence of urbanization on these animals. Along with a staff of collections managers, Jann supervises the Natural History Museum’s malacology collection of nearly 5 million specimens and its Invertebrate Paleontological collection, which is between 7-10 million specimens. She serves as an advisor to the Nature Conservancy’s Biodiversity Analysis in Los Angeles (BAILA) project and has been a member of the La Kretz Center Postdoctoral FellowshipSearch Committee since 2016. She has a B.A. from Colgate University in Biology and Geology and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.