Dennis Jongsomjit

Geospatial Ecologist

As a Geospatial Ecologist in the Ecoinformatics & Climate Solutions Group I have focused my efforts on modeling, mapping, and investigating landscape and climate change factors affecting wildlife populations. I’ve worked on projects examining the potential future distributions and abundance of vegetation and birds throughout the western U.S. and northern Mexico, modeling the distributions of mesopredators in the Southern Ocean, and modeling the effects of sea-level rise on tidal marsh habitat around San Francisco Bay.

Being utterly fascinated as a kid with wildlife programs on television, I escaped from the jungles of Los Angeles to earn my Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Conservation Biology from the University of California, Davis. After working on ducks with a graduate student I became interested in birds and came to what was then PRBO in 2001 as an intern nest searcher (a “gridder”) at our Palomarin field station. Getting to know dozens of songbirds individually was mind-altering. I stayed on as an intern bird bander then was hired on as the gridder supervisor. At Palomarin I worked on the creation of a guide to aging altricial nestlings to help better our understanding of factors affecting nest success.  I did a brief stint tracking radio-collared coyotes in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then worked for two seasons with our Sierra Nevada Group banding birds and surveying them across the various habitats of the northern Sierra.

I live and work in Petaluma, but I consider California my home.  When not at work I might be hiking, tromping around San Francisco, playing disc golf, watching the Lakers or Dodgers, playing my drum kit, or cooking dinner.

View my CV here