Maile C Neel

Professor, Plant Science & Landscape Architecture, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources

I am committed to conducting research on problems faced by practitioners, and communicating my results such that they provide specific, practical guidance for conservation policy and management. I am committed to training students and post-doctoral researchers to work at the interface between science, policy, and practice.

Working on a wide variety of conservation issues has given me the opportunity to integrate techniques from traditionally disparate fields  to quantify genetic, species, and community diversity.  I consequently draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies including population genetics, systematics, and population, community and landscape ecology and restoration ecology. Research in the lab also spans a range of localities and scales, including the Chesapeake Bay, southern California, and the Atlantic coastal plain.

Beyond addressing questions in specific conservation situations I test basic assumptions on which conservation biology is based. Because it is typically not possible to collect all desirable data on a particular problem in timeframes necessary to contribute to management, practitioners rely on general principles derived from ecology, population genetics and population biology theory. Verifying the validity of such assumptions is critical to identifying where general principles apply and where acquiring new scientific information is necessary for sound decision-making.