I'm a plant ecologist with a particular interest in California's High Sierra. I've completed a PhD studying alpine plants on Coyote Ridge, investigating how different geologic substrates influence plant distribution and physiological ecology. On the side of my "real job" (as a plant ecologist), I write hiking guides for the Sierra Nevada, published through Wilderness Press. These include a guide to the John Muir Trail, the recent updates of Sierra North and Sierra South, and the most recent edition of the Complete Hikers Guide to the Sierra. The books are all filled with descriptions of the Sierra's natural history - hopefully teaching people to look around them as they walk. I'm a decent, but not expert botanist, and appreciate when people find mistakes in my identifications.

Despite my obvious attachment to the Sierra Nevada, I'm based in Sydney, Australia for ~10 months each year, returning to the mountains for the summer.

Sept 2024: A note - when I uploaded my Sierra photos from this summer, I realized that iNat's CV model now captures most of the Sierra's plants and out of 1000+ observations I only disagreed with it 1-2 times - for the subset of observations where the plant in the photograph was already in the CV model. But there are a lot of Sierra endemics that don't yet have the 60+ observations required for CV and I've noticed that a lot of those species are now being mistakenly IDed as the closest CV match, as ever more people trust CV to species. I've therefore been focusing on adding photographs of Sierra endemics - even if these are very common in the Sierra - and on adding IDs to others photographs of these species. Please let me know if I've made a mistake!