Title: Innovating Approaches to Understand the Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Ecosystem Services
Speaker: Kyle Manley, Earth Lab

Abstract: As climate change alters ecosystems' structure and functioning, it creates cascading impacts on the benefits people derive from them (i.e., ecosystem services), ultimately affecting human well-being. However, there remains limited understanding of how climate change will alter these services, particularly the non-material benefits (i.e., cultural ecosystem services). In this talk, I will present an overview of my PhD research, focusing on new approaches to better represent nature’s immaterial contributions to people and assess the effects of climate change on these benefits, focusing on recreation and tourism. Additionally, I will introduce my related postdoctoral project, which explores how wildfire and prescribed fire impact recreation in the US West—both in the long term, as visitation patterns shift post-disturbance, and in the short term, as smoke influences recreational behavior and affects visitors directly.

Speaker Bio: Kyle Manley (he/him) is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist interested in climate change adaptation, ecosystem services, and social-ecological systems. He is a CIRES Postdoctoral Fellow working in Earth Lab with Dr. Jennifer Balch (GEOG) and Dr. Laura Dee (EBIO). He received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder and a Ph.D. in Earth System Science from the University of California Irvine. His current research focuses on the social-ecological impacts of wildfire and prescribed fire in the US West from the perspective of impacts to, and impacts from the use of, cultural ecosystem services.