By Rob Jordan

Fiorenza Micheli, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment-affiliated professor of biological sciences at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, and Rebecca Bird, an ecological anthropologist, were recently awarded National Science Foundation grants of $1.3 million and $250,000, respectively.

Both research researchers’ projects got their start with funding from the Stanford Woods Institute’s Environmental Venture Projects, seed grants for transformative environmental and sustainability research.

Micheli’s project will study the capacity of natural systems and human communities to adapt to environmental change, specifically investigating the impacts of oceanographic variability on coastal marine ecosystems and human communities of the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico and the influences of local and global feedbacks on the resilience and adaptive capacity of these systems.

Bird’s project will measure direct effects of indigenous burning practices on woodlands and low-elevation, mixed forests in the Central Valley, Klamath Mountains, and Sierra Nevada and indirect effects of these practices on the availability of wild foods and materials used by indigenous peoples that inhabit the woodlands.