Janet Franklin is the Endowed Campanile Foundation Professor in the Department of Geography, San Diego State University. She was previously a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Botany, University of California at Riverside (2017-2022), a Regent’s Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, as well as a Distinguished sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University where she was appointed in 2009. From 1988-2009 she was and Assistant, Associate and Full Professor on the faculties of Geography and Biology at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California – Santa Barbara in 1988. Her research expertise is in Landscape Ecology, Global Change Biology, Conservation Biogeography, and Geospatial Science.

Franklin’s scholarship seeks to understand the patterns and dynamics of terrestrial (land) plant communities at the landscape scale. Her work addresses the impacts of human-caused landscape change on the environment and biological diversity. Human land use – agriculture and urbanization – and other global human impacts such as climate change, and the introduction of exotic species, interact with natural disturbance regimes such as fire, flooding and hurricanes, to shape plant community dynamics in forests, shrublands, and other ecosystems. How resilient are ecological communities to these past, present and future impacts? How can ecosystems be stewarded sustainably in a rapidly changing world?

She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America. She is an Associate Member of the Centre for Coastal Paleoscience, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She has published over 175 refereed journal articles and has received research grants from NSF, NASA, the USDA Forest Service, and USGS. Her book Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction (Cambridge University Press) has been cited over 3000 times.