Stephanie Copeland

Affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center

Division: Earth Science Division (SG)

Email: stephanie.copeland@nasa.gov

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7055-6288

Professional Biography

Stephanie is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow with NEX. Her work combines remote sensing, community ecology, and disturbance ecology to understand how wildlife biodiversity responds and recovers from wildfire.

Her postdoctoral research is a collaboration between NASA and the California Sentinel Site Network. She links Earth observations from Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 products, VIIRS, and GEDIwith on-the-ground monitoring of wildlife from acoustic recorders, camera traps, MOTUS telemetry, and environmental DNA. With these data she models how fire severity and landscape features such as connectivity, habitat heterogeneity, and refugia shape biodiversity loss and recovery. The work will in the future produce recovery timelines, resilience maps, and management recommendations that land managers can use to guide post-fire conservation.

Stephanie earned her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied how land use, climate, and wildlife communities shaped tick and mosquito populations, and disease risk in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada. That work included spatial models of West Nile virus risk due to bird movement and an experimental study of how rangeland cattle and wildlife indirectly affect tick abundance and survival.

Education

PhD, Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara

BS, Biomedical Sciences, University of New Hampshire

Research Interests

Remote sensing applications, wildland fire, hydrology, terrestrial ecology, natural resource management, near surface spectroscopy

Awards and Honors

2023, 2024: Schmidt Family Foundation Mentorship Fellowship

2021: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Select Publications

• Copeland, S., Sambado. S., Orr, D., Bui, A., Swei, A., & Young, H. S. (2025). Variable Effects of Wildlife and Livestock on Questing Tick Abundance across a Topographical-Climatic Gradient. Ecosphere 16(2): e70190. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70190
• Zilz, Z. L., Copeland, S., & Young, H. S. (2023). Consistent foraging on marine resources by coyotes (Canis latrans) on the Southern California coast. Food Webs 37: e00311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodweb.2023.e00311