Martha Hoopes

Martha has worked in conservation policy and research. She designed self-sufficient waste management programs for wildlife reserves in Argentina through the Fundacion Vida Silvestre and worked for the US National Park Service (NPS) analyzing inventory and monitoring data. When she switched to more biological research, she worked with a wildlife lab (Center for Urban Ecology, CUE) in NPS and then started PhD work at UC Davis. Her dissertation research examined how invasive annual grasses, small mammal herbivores, soil quality, and water availability affected the CA native perennial grass, Sporobolus airoides. Her work led to changes in grassland management in the San Joaquin Valley of CA. During graduate school, Martha also assembled a biotic survey of a state park (Great Valley Grasslands) with recommendations for monitoring and management and wrote a chapter on spatial issues in conservation for the book, Conservation Science and Action (W. J. Sutherland, ed.). Her postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley examined spatial community dynamics by looking at the role of dispersal in the dynamics of a galling herbivore and a suite of parasitoids that attack it. In July 2004 she started as an assistant professor at Mt Holyoke College in Massachusetts where she is continuing her research on the role of movement and invasions in community dynamics.