Alison Whipple's picture

Alison Whipple, PhD

Program Science Director
Resilient Landscapes Program
Delta Science & Management
Historical Ecology
Watershed Science & Management
(510) 746-7318
[email protected]

Alison Whipple is Science Director of the Resilient Landscapes Program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. She has an interdisciplinary background in hydrologic sciences, floodplain restoration, landscape ecology, and climate change. Her work is motivated by the need to support diverse and productive ecosystems in a highly altered and changing world through science-informed land and water management. She completed her PhD in Hydrologic Sciences from the University of California at Davis in 2018, and her research addressed hydrologic and floodplain inundation regime characterization, hydrodynamic modeling, and spatial analysis to understand restoration potential. She worked with the San Francisco Estuary Institute prior to graduate school, focused on historical ecology of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. She received her MS and BS from Stanford University in Earth Systems, with her thesis on low-flow characteristics of small coastal watershed streams of Northern California.

Related Projects, News, and Events

Delta Landscapes Project (Project)

The Delta Landscapes Project, which began in 2012 and will run through 2016, has developed a body of work to inform landscape-scale restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem.
KQED QUEST Highlights Delta Historical Ecology Study (News)

 

As detective stories go, this sunny, spring day in the Delta isn't a typical backdrop. In the distance, tractors move slowly through dry fields of row crops.

"Once he got lost, they were wandering all over," says Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a non-profit research group based in Richmond. Her colleague, Robin Grossinger, agrees. "They were all over this place." The two are trying to piece together the path of William Wright, a man who got hopelessly lost somewhere nearby.
SFEI is working with the Santa Clara Valley Water District to develop multi-benefit management tools (News)

In 2014, SFEI and the Santa Valley Water District launched a collaborative partnership aimed at sharing experience, knowledge and resources, and working toward a shared vision of watershed management. Through this partnership, the District has asked SFEI to develop a set of online tools to: 1) identify opportunities for multi-benefit management actions in and along the channels managed by the District; and 2) track the impacts of those actions towards meeting established management targets.