About

Carl Boettiger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in 2012 in Population Biology from UC Davis and his B.A. in Physics from Princeton University in 2007. His research focuses on ecological forecasting and decision making under uncertainty, with applications for global change, conservation, and natural resource management. He is particularly interested in predicting and managing ecological systems that may experience regime shifts, which are sudden and dramatic changes that challenge existing models and data. Boettiger emphasizes the importance of leveraging advances in computational power, ecological and environmental data, and informatics to develop new mathematical, statistical, and computational approaches. His work blends ecological theory with the synthesis of heterogeneous data and software development, contributing to the field of data science. His research interests include theoretical ecology, ecoinformatics, modeling, data science, resilience, early warning signals, and decision theory.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Engineering
• Social Science
• Environmental resource management
• Ecology
• Political Science
• Environmental science
• Economics
• Engineering ethics
• Business
• Biology
• Geography
• Marketing

Selected publications

• CA 30x30 Planning & Assessment Tool

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-04-14

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  A decision-support tool developed in collaboration with the California Biodiversity Network to align with the CA 30x30 Biodiversity Assessment. The tool can answer complex, real world natural language queries asked by conservation partner organizations, responding with reproducible, verifiable data summaries, charts, maps and text through careful integration of open weights language models and cloud optimized ecological and socio-environmental data. With this tool, you can explore habitats and features that support biodiversity within California's 30x30 conservation areas, other conservation areas, and non-conserved lands. This tool provides insight into what is conserved, what is lacking protection, and opportunities to fill these gaps.

  PublisherDOI

• Removing barriers to science-informed decision-making through data science and human-centered design

  2026-03-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Having policy and regulation be based on the best available scientific evidence is a widely accepted goal, yet relevant knowledge often fails to reach those most in need due to gaps in data accessibility and technological barriers. We share our experience developing tangible, scalable tools that support policymakers, indigenous groups, and land managers in bringing science to the table when decisions are being made. These projects are united by common principles of participatory user-centered design, digital sovereignty, open-source software development, modern data science, and scientific integrity.Specifically, we present three case studies across different governance scales: 1) At the international level, we discuss interactive decision support tools to facilitate science-based policymaking in the United Nations Montreal Protocol and Global Plastics Treaty. 2) At the national level, we present a stochastic, open-source simulation platform built in collaboration with the U.S. National Park Service. It enables land managers to model vegetation resilience and evaluate post-fire management scenarios under diverse future climate projections. 3) At the local level, we highlight custom-built, co-developed software to monitor cases of Indigenous land return alongside a biodiversity monitoring application for improved land management decision-making by Indigenous communities.Across these projects, we will discuss lessons learned regarding the challenges of working with partners in highly interdisciplinary environments, how open science principles can be used to support community sovereignty instead of clashing with it, and the creation of resilient services that survive long-term regardless of infrastructure constraints or organizational change.

  PublisherDOI

• A Path to Better Science Through Co‐Creation and Open Infrastructure

  Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists · 2026-05-06

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Proprietary development solutions are often perceived as being delivered more quickly and easily than open methods, fueling the misconception that they inherently produce better overall outcomes. However, we argue that open development practices can lead to both efficient and maximally impactful outcomes. One successful strategy for accelerating open approaches in the geosciences is co‐creation, a model that emphasizes shared ownership between developers and users. This approach creates a collaborative flywheel dynamic—pioneered in the geosciences by the Pangeo project—that encourages teamwork, standardizes access to shared infrastructure, and facilitates iterations of stakeholder feedback and development to accelerate solution finding.

  PublisherDOI

• Integrating future climate projections into post-fire management: A stochastic decision-support toolbox for adaptation in arid ecosystems

  2026-03-13

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Wildfire is a multi-dimensional hazard, impacting both human livelihoods and ecosystem function. Beyond wildfire prediction and containment, post-fire reconstruction is a major management challenge. With shifting and novel fire regimes, post-fire recovery represents a complex risk-management challenge where decisions made under high uncertainty have long-term implications for systemic resilience.There is an urgent need for tools which allow land managers to explore their options in an accessible, systematic and transparent way.Here, we present a joint effort between the Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment and the U.S. National Parks Service to design a decision-support platform, enabling park managers to create future management scenarios based on current understanding of climate futures to guide their decision making. Using the Mojave Desert ecosystem in Southern California as a case study, we discuss our collaborative co-design process, technical infrastructure and scientific reasoning in translating high-performance vegetation modeling into actionable policy insightsMore specifically, we present josh, an open-source, domain-specific scripting language linked to a high-performance simulation engine. We illustrate how josh can be used to design vegetation models and management intervention for a range of ecosystems, integrate different high-resolution future climate projections and quantify risk and uncertainties through running large, stochastic ensemble simulations. The platform is freely available, open-source, and runs in any web browser, as well as on distributed computing systems; providing a transparent and accountable tool for evidence-based adaptation planning.

  PublisherDOI

• Post-fire recovery and the role of armed conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean - A case study in Lebanon

  2025-03-15

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Wildfires are a natural feature of Mediterranean ecosystems. However, research efforts are unevenly distributed, with fire ecology of the Eastern Mediterranean remaining understudied compared to other parts of the biome. Furthermore, direct and indirect links between armed conflict and wildfires have been suggested for this region, interacting with climatological and ecological factors to create complex fire dynamics that are not yet well understood. Mediterranean ecosystems are adapted to fire and in general exhibit strong regeneration capabilities. Nevertheless, with a drier and hotter climate anticipated in the future due to climate change, there is concern of overstretching the ecosystem’s regenerative ability. In the Eastern Mediterranean, while more research regarding fire regimes and fire risk has emerged in recent years, vegetation recovery after fire has rarely been investigated.Using Lebanon as a case study, we aim to disentangle the roles of climate, armed conflict, and other human impacts in post-fire recovery patterns in Eastern Mediterranean ecosystems. Using a recently compiled, national fire occurrence dataset and publicly available vegetation indices data, we will first create a statistical model to identify areas where fire activity is primarily driven by climate vs. conflict. We will then study recovery trajectories of vegetation after wildfire to address the following questions:  (1) Does vegetation recover after wildfire, and if so, on what timescales? (2) Which environmental factors control recovery dynamics? (3) Do climate- vs. conflict driven fires differ in their properties, e.g. size? and (4) Are there differences in recovery patterns between climate- and conflict-associated fires?

  PublisherDOI

• OmniMesh: Addressing Findability Challenges in Distributed Nature Data Repositories

  2025-06-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• AusTraits Plant Dictionary (APD)

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-06-20 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The Austraits Plant Dictionary (APD) offers detailed descriptions for more than 500 plant trait concepts. APD includes trait focused on plant morphology, plant nutrient concentrations, plant physiology, plant life history, and plant fire response. The definitions will be useful to researchers from diverse disciplines, including plant functional ecology, plant taxonomy, and conservation biology. All trait concepts are supported by comprehensive metadata including trait descriptions, allowable trait values, allowable ranges, preferred units, keywords, references, and links to matches in a selection of trait databases. The traits describe here also fully support the AusTraits plant trait database, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3568417. The APD can be viewed online at: https://w3id.org/APD https://vocabs.ardc.edu.au/viewById/649 (Research Vocabularies Australia) The project GitHub repository is at: https://github.com/traitecoevo/APD

  PublisherDOI

• The transition from resistance to acceptance: Managing a marine invasive species in a changing world

  Journal of Applied Ecology · 2025-01-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Marine invasive species can transform coastal ecosystems, yet mitigating their effects can be difficult, and even impractical. Often, marine invasive species are managed at poorly matched spatial scales, and at the same time, rates of spread and establishment are increasing under climate change and can outpace resources available for population suppression. These circumstances challenge traditional conservation goals of maintaining a historic environmental state, especially for a species like the European green crab ( Carcinus maenas ), a formidable invader with few examples of successful long‐term removal programs. A management paradigm where decision alternatives include resisting or accepting a new ecological trajectory may be needed. We apply mathematical concepts from decision theory to develop a quantitative framework for navigating management decisions in this new resist‐accept paradigm. We develop a model of European green crab growth, removal and colonization, and we find optimal levels of removal effort that minimize both ecological change and removal cost. We establish a benchmark of colonization pressure at which green crab density becomes decoupled from a decision maker's actions, such that population control can no longer shape the invasion trajectory. For informing the decision boundary between resistance and acceptance, our results highlight that a decision maker's understanding of how removal cost scales with removal effort is more important than understanding the density‐impact relationship. We show that assuming stationary system dynamics can result in sub‐optimal levels of species removal effort, highlighting the importance of developing anticipatory management strategies by accounting for non‐stationary dynamics. Policy implications . For marine invasive species that can disperse across long distances and recolonize rapidly after removal, the focus of conservation policy should shift away from understanding how to resist change to understanding when to stop resisting change. Navigating this decision problem involves trade‐offs among competing objectives, highlighting the need for structured approaches to elicit objective weights that reflect the values of the decision maker. For natural resource managers facing possible ecosystem transformation, this decision framework can enable proactive and strategic decisions made under uncertainty in a changing world.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Maps to Models: Participation and Contestability in the Dynamic Management of Natural Resources

  2025-09-09

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  How does stakeholder participation in natural resource management change when conservation rules are grounded in near real-time data? Recent technological advances have increased the feasibility of the ‘dynamic management’ of natural resources, which promises to align the spatiotemporal scales of management with ecological variability and resource use. Drawing on Kelty’s (2020) concept of ‘contributory autonomy,’ this article offers a critical comparison of how participation is conceived of in the more established context of static conservation areas and planning versus the emergent field of dynamic management. A systematic review of the dynamic ocean management literature reveals a varied, but shallow engagement with the topic of stakeholder participation in that context. Whereas static management regimes are governed by relatively intuitive and contestable maps, dynamic management is governed by models and data flows. Overall, the decision-making stakeholder of participatory mapping processes under static management is displaced by the stakeholder conceived as an ‘end-user’ of a dynamic management product and consultant in its design. Yet, these shifts also open up potential points of contestation, which may pattern the future theory and practice of participation in dynamic management: counterdata, countermodeling, and data chokepoints. Beyond the empirical focus on oceans, this article contributes to broader conversations about the political stakes of environmental data, and algorithmic and artificial intelligence-driven natural resource conservation by considering how possibilities for participation are foreclosed, enabled, and reconstituted by new spatiotemporal and technological conditions.

  PublisherDOI

• Global monitoring of wildlife mortality through participatory science in near-real time

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-08-12 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Detection of wildlife mortality events is critical for timely conservation and natural resource management. We present an open-source, web-based decision support tool that queries, aggregates and summarizes participatory science data from iNaturalist to monitor mortality events worldwide. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using four case studies spanning taxonomic, spatial, and temporal scales. In Canada and the United States, high peaks of bird mortality coincided with zoonotic risk during avian influenza outbreaks. Across Latin America, we detected 75 mortality events of critically endangered species. In California, recorded mammal mortality was associated with human infrastructure, including proximity to roads, and to a lesser extent, the human footprint. Mortality of pumas ( Puma concolor ) was detected across nine countries, highlighting the need for international cooperation to conserve mobile species. Our tool enables resource managers to flag emerging threats and empowers participatory scientists to monitor and integrate mortality records for conservation.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2013

  NSF · $138k · 2013–2015

• CAREER: Harnessing the data revolution for predicting and managing ecosystem regime shifts

  NSF · $595k · 2020–2027

• Codemeta: A Rosetta Stone for Metadata in Scientific Software

  NSF · $166k · 2015–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Scott Chamberlain

  42 shared

• Karthik Ram

  25 shared

• Melissa Chapman

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  21 shared

• Matthew B. Jones

  University of California, Berkeley

  17 shared

• Alan Hastings

  University of California, Davis

  15 shared

• R. Quinn Thomas

  13 shared

• Milad Memarzadeh

  Ames Research Center

  12 shared

• Marcus Lapeyrolerie

  University of California, Berkeley

  11 shared

Education

• PhD, Population Biology

  University of California Davis

  2012

• AB, Physics

  Princeton University

  2007