Janet Franklin

Janet Franklin (born July 8, 1959 in Frankfurt, Germany^[1]) is an American geographer, botanist, and landscape ecologist. Her work is centered on the use of remote sensing to model and understand vegetated landscapes. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biogeography in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside.^[2]

Franklin grew up near San Francisco.^[1] She received a B.A. in Environmental Biology from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1979. Subsequently, she received a master's degree from UCSB in Geography in 1983, and finally a PhD from the same institution in 1988.^[3] Her thesis focused on the remote sensing of woody vegetation structures in Mali.^[4][5]

Franklin received her start in remote sensing as a doctoral candidate when she was recruited by a professor on the basis of her ability to distinguish different species of pine tree from aerial photographs.^[6]

In 1988, Franklin began teaching and researching at San Diego State University, where she remained until 2009. Her 1995 paper, Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modeling of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients, is considered a foundational work of modern, remote sensing-based landscape ecology. In 2009, she was appointed as a professor of geography at Arizona State University, becoming a Regent's Professor in 2015.^[7] From 2014 to 2016, she was president of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology.^[1] Some of her research has focused on island ecosystems in the West Indies and Polynesia. In 2017, she was appointed to the University of California Riverside.^[2]

Franklin's work focuses on the use of remote sensing techniques to model and understand vegetated landscapes.^[6] She has made significant contributions to the study of human-caused landscape change and predictive vegetation mapping.^[8][9] In recent years, much of her work has focused on climate change, both present and historical.^[10][11][12]

Franklin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences^[1] and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also the current editor-in-chief of Diversity & Distributions, a highly ranked journal on conservation biogeography.

Franklin is the author of one book and over 120 peer-reviewed academic papers.^[3]

Book

• Franklin, Janet. Mapping species distributions: spatial inference and prediction. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Articles

• Franklin, Janet. "Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modellng of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients." Progress in physical geography 19, no. 4 (1995)
• Franklin, Janet. "Predicting the distribution of shrub species in southern California from climate and terrain‐derived variables." Journal of Vegetation Science 9, no. 5 (1998)
• Franklin, Janet. "Moving beyond static species distribution models in support of conservation biogeography." Diversity and Distributions 16, no. 3 (2010)
• Franklin, Janet, et al. "Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine scale do climate projections need to be?." Global change biology 19.2 (2013)