Graduate student
California State University, Northridge
My name is Richard (he/him/his), I'm a queer jewish plant ecologist and graduate student from Cal State Northridge in Los Angeles, California in the terHorst lab. The topics I find most interesting are community science, fire ecology, and urban ecology. My master's thesis is studying plant succession post-wildfire in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area using collaborative undergraduate data and the interactions between species abundances and burn severity, frequency, and fire return interval. I'm also the Los Angeles County Volunteer Coordinator for the Western Monarch Project, where we count overwintering monarch butterflies on the coast of Los Angeles as they spend the winter before laying eggs and continuing their intergenerational migration. I joined the project because when we count, advocate for, and protect this charismatic species, we also end up advocating for other pollinators that depend on similar host and nectar plants as monarch butterflies.
When I'm not frantically trying to finish my master's degree, I am leading wildflower hikes with Theodore Payne Foundation, California Gay Adventures, and other organizations that advocate for conservation, women, and underrepresented representation in the outdoors. I strongly believe that the best way to teach natural history is to allow people to access the information themselves and not spoon-feed identifications. This is one reason I also strongly advocate for iNaturalist, a community science application I use frequently. I roam around Los Angeles ground-truthing relictual native plant habitats, searching monarch overwintering sightings, and finding new invasive species all using the app. When I try not to think too much about science, I enjoy going to the movies with my filmmaking boyfriend, and play Pokemon with him. I'll be joining the Caughlin lab at Boise State University Spring 2023 to study sagebrush steppe plant communities using remotely sensed imagery.