Southwest Plant Materials Ecologist

Lani is a Plant Materials Ecologist with the Southwest Office, and is responsible for managing the Southwest Seed Partnership database, seed cleaning and processing, and leading seed collection for pollinator habitat restoration. She also assists with various pollinator monitoring and population survey projects. Lani received a B.S. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Rice University with minors in Environmental Science and Anthropology. She previously worked for the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center before joining IAE in 2023, and has done field work across the United States in habitat restoration, herbarium research, landscape biogeochemistry, population ecology, and entomology.