Member Profile
Elizabeth Bella
Partnership for Environmental Education
IGERT trainees Tawny Mata, Alpa Wintzer, Elizabeth Bella, and Elizabeth Wells worked with a local non-profit organization to create an environmental education curriculum. This curriculum includes units on... More »
About Me
Elizabeth (Libby) Bella is Ecologist at The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Soldotna, Alaska. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Lincoln University near Christchurch, New Zealand, in invasion potential of NZ non-native plant species. For her dissertation, she studied vegetation change under a warming climate in Alaska using biogeoclimatic modeling. Her primary interest and career goals are investigating methods of incorporating climate change effects into long-term resilience and adaptive management planning for land managers. Libby has previously worked as an ecologist for NRCS-Soil Survey, wetland scientist for HDR Alaska, Inc., an ecologist with CH2M Hill, and as an ecologist for the Forest Service on the Chugach National Forest in Seward, Alaska. She earned a Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of California – Davis in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy with a primary interest in invasive species biology. She earned a MS degree in Forestry from the University of Montana, and a BS in Forestry and Biology from SUNY-ESF in NY. Libby has lengthy experience working in natural resources in Alaska, with substantial time spent in invasive species work. She is skilled in field data collection, data processing and analysis, modeling and interpretation of ecological data, and technical writing. She is experienced in vegetation inventory, monitoring, and management at various scales, with specific skills in successional pathway modeling; invasive, sensitive and rare plant habitat prediction; riparian systems restoration and monitoring; and vegetation type mapping and classification.
