Bruce Young, Ph.D., Director, Species Science, NatureServe

Dr. Bruce Young focuses on the species side of biodiversity conservation in the Americas. He currently coordinates NatureServe’s botany and zoology programs where he has led the development of widely used conservation status assessments and digital distribution maps. He coauthored NatureServe’s climate change strategy and led the development of a Climate Change Vulnerability Index as a means to rapidly assess the relative vulnerability of plants and animals to climate change. He has contributed to publications on climate change vulnerability produced by the Association for Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the National Wildlife Federation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Prior to that, Young served as the Western Hemisphere coordinator for the Global Amphibian Assessment and contributed to a well cited study linking amphibian declines to climate change. Young studied at Cornell (B.S.) and the University of Washington (Ph.D.).