Confluence Plenary Speakers
In addition to our wonderful and talented graduate and undergraduate speakers, we will also be hearing from two amazing keynote speakers!
Lynda Mapes || How to talk to the media about your science... and be glad you did
April 10th, 9am
Join veteran journalist and author Lynda Mapes for practical tips useful for graduate students and scientists at any stage of their career on how to get your science out there for greater impact. Radio, newspaper and magazine reporters are eager to get out in the field with you, learn your questions and how you seek to answer them, through scientific inquiry. These can be compelling stories for mainstream audiences that get your work before the public, and helps educate people about science, how it works, and why it matters. This is more important than ever in an age of skepticism and even outright ignorance about science and why it matters.
We will talk about how to handle press inquiries, do interviews, and follow up to keep the conversation going.
Lynda V. Mapes specializes in coverage of the environment and Indigenous cultures and governments. Over the course of her 27-year career as a reporter at The Seattle Times she earned numerous awards, including twice winning the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli gold award for science journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest professional science association. She and a team of journalists at the Seattle Times were finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
She has written seven books, including most recently The Trees are Speaking, Dispatches from the Salmon Forests just published by the University of Washington Press. She is the winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award, and 2021 Washington State Book Award for non-fiction. She is an associate of the Harvard Forest, and lives in Seattle.
Dr. L. Monika Moskal || Clouds of Points, Mountains of Data: Turning LiDAR into Ecology
April 10th, 3:30pm
Dr. L. Monika Moskal is a Professor of Remote Sensing and Earth Observation in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, and serves as Director of the Program on the Environment. She leads the Remote Sensing & Geospatial Analysis Lab, using hyper‑resolution remote sensing to study ecological landscape structure, function and change.
Her talk will present research on transforming high‑resolution airborne and terrestrial LiDAR point clouds into ecological insights—mapping landscape structure from forests to wetlands, biomass and habitat complexity. It’ll cover workflows for processing massive point datasets, extracting ecologically meaningful metrics, scaling from plot to region, and quantifying uncertainty using a variety of examples from her labs research projects across western North American ecosystems.