Biosketch: Lucy Hutyra

Lucy Hutyra is a research scientist and the laboratory manager for the Urban Ecology Research Lab, Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington. Lucy was trained as an ecologist and Earth scientist with interests in the terrestrial carbon and water cycles, climate change, and land use change dynamics. Lucy completed her undergraduate degree in forest ecology and management at the University of Washington in 1998. She went on to start a career in research at Harvard University working on ground-based measurements of forest structure and carbon dynamics across boreal (BOREAS, Manitoba, Canada), temperate (Harvard Forest, Massachusetts), and tropical (Para, Brazil) forested ecosystems. In 2002 she started her doctorate with Steven Wofsy in Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University. Over the next 5 years she made dozen of trips to the Brazilian Amazon and wrote her thesis looking at carbon and water exchange in Amazonian rainforests. For her doctorate she combined ground-based vegetation measurements, tower-based eddy covariance measurements, remote sensing data, and models to study the carbon exchange dynamics, forest structure, and resilience of primary tropical rainforests. Lucy co-authored over a dozen papers about tropical forests before venturing into research on urban ecosystems. She is currently working to understand and quantify the processes, dynamics, and consequences and land cover/land use change.