Talks on the Rock: Tessa Francis | Nature’s Future in Puget Sound

How will climate change, population growth, and development affect Puget Sound and the natural resources we care about? Growing human population and changing climate threaten habitats and species, as well as the social and economic systems that depend on them. A major challenge is to understand how future conditions, and our decisions to manage them, will affect the interconnected natural and human systems in our region. In this talk, Tesse will share how a connected terrestrial-freshwater-marine-human system modeling framework being developed at the University of Washington’s Puget Sound Institute will help us understand the interactive effects of future threats to nature in our region, and evaluate their impacts on ecological, social, and economic benefits we depend on.
Tessa Francis is the Lead Ecosystem Ecologist at the Puget Sound Institute, and the Managing Director of the Ocean Modeling Forum. Tessa holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley; a B.S. in Wildlife Science from the University of Washington; and a Ph.D. in Zoology and Urban Ecology from the University of Washington.
Tessa is an aquatic ecologist, trained as a limnologist and working in marine systems for the last 10+ years. She is interested in the important associations between terrestrial and aquatic habitats, and how watershed and shoreline dynamics impact aquatic food webs and populations. Tessa’s field work focuses on ecosystem-based management of Puget Sound fish, including forage fish and salmonids. At PSI, she leads boundary-spanning activities and projects to link best available science to ecosystem-based management of Puget Sound, including via modeling and synthesis projects. At the Ocean Modeling Forum, Tessa forms and leads multidisciplinary working groups to improve model-based advice for ocean management, using multi-model approaches. She is also the chair of the PSEMP Modeling Work Group.
This talk is presented in collaboration with Vashon Nature Center.