Dr. Hugh Safford
Before joining Vibrant Planet as its chief scientist in January, 2022, Dr. Hugh Safford was Regional Ecologist for the USDA-Forest Service’s Region 5 (California, Hawaii, Pacific territories) for more than two decades. In synergy with his work at Vibrant Planet, Safford is a member of the research faculty at the University of California-Davis. Safford is director of the Sierra Nevada section of the California Fire Science Consortium, and he is PI of the California Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program (a partnership with CALFIRE), as well as the multipartner Southern California Montane Forest Conservation Strategy. Safford has provided international technical assistance on fire, forest management, and climate change issues since the 1990s. Recent projects include fire risk mapping in Georgia, fire management planning in Mexico, climate change adaptation in Brazil, and forest restoration in North Africa and the Levant. Safford was a Fulbright Fellow between 2017 and 2019, where he studied post-fire ecosystem restoration practices in the Mediterranean Basin. Safford co-edited the 2021 Postfire Restoration Framework for National Forests in California, which provides guidance for management decision-making in burned ecosystems under changing environmental baselines. Visit the Safford Lab at UC-Davis.
“I worked for a couple of decades in a federal land and resource management agency, and although I loved my job and the people I worked with, and although I never doubted the commitment of my colleagues, I gradually lost confidence that politics, budgets, and capacities would ever permit the major management changes to be made that need to be made if we are to be managing intact ecosystems through the 21st century. In late 2021, Vibrant Planet was a fresh new face in the environmental sustainability world, and its world-class staff of land managers, foresters, scientists, data and software engineers, client experience specialists, and start-up gurus seemed well-positioned to make inroads in some of these seemingly intractable conundrums. I especially loved the bottom-up, manager-first mind set that permeated the organization, and the level of data and software engineering was like nothing I’d ever seen. Since I joined Vibrant Planet, 2 ½ years ago, the staff has grown by 5-times, and we’ve built a world-class science organization within the business. I’m proud to have helped build that organization, and every time I interact with one of our amazing staff, I’m reminded why I made the jump.”