Dr. Marc Mayes is an environmental scientist and remote sensing expert. He leads research and projects that inform landscape management for climate change adaptation, including forest, woodland and shrubland habitat conservation, water and soil resource conservation, and mitigation of natural hazards such as wildfire. Dr. Mayes’ expertise includes applications of satellite, manned aircraft and drone-based remote sensing for environmental monitoring at site to watershed scales. His projects have addressed forest conservation planning in East Africa and Mexico, monitoring water stress in riparian woodlands of the US southwest, and California oak woodland conservation, including mitigation of goldspotted oak borer (GSOB) invasions across southern California in a collaborative project with the US Forest Service. Dr. Mayes has been working in Santa Barbara County landscapes since 2018 with a focus on wildfire hazard mitigation and post-fire ecosystems recovery. He led an assessment of flood infrastructure performance after the Thomas Fire and January 2018 debris flows, and is involved with ongoing research on interactions of grazing management and fire behavior at UC Santa Barbara’s Sedgwick Reserve.
Dr. Mayes joins SIG-NAL after having worked at UC Santa Barbara’s Earth Research Institute (ERI) as an Associate Specialist in Earth sciences and remote sensing since 2018. From 2016-2018, Marc was a Nature Conservancy NatureNet Postdoctoral Fellow, based between UCSB and Princeton University. Marc received his Sc.B. in Geology and Chemistry from Brown University, an M.S. in Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute, and his PhD in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences from Brown University (Brown University-Marine Biological Lab Joint PhD Program).