Mary L. Cadenasso is a Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. She received a National Science Foundation Career award and was recently named a Chancellor's Fellow. Her research interests span landscape, ecosystem, and plant ecology and focus on determining how the spatial heterogeneity of a system is linked to ecosystem functions and change of that system. Her work has been widely published in more than 50 peer reviewed journal articles, 25 book chapters and two books.