Sonoma State faculty conduct research and create art and knowledge that changes the world. Below are a few recently released examples: 

Kouba, P. V., Latimer, A. M., Young, D. J. N., Odkins, M., Bell, D. M., Clark, I. R., & North, M. P. (2025). Prescribed and natural fire help restore fire-adapted conditions in an Eastern Sierra Jeffrey pine forest. Forest Ecology and Management, 595, Article 123010. 
In the western US, restoring forests to historical, fire-adapted conditions can reduce fire risk, but most fire-adapted restoration targets in California focus on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. By comparison, Eastern Sierra Jeffrey pine forests experience distinct climate and growing conditions, and both their historical structure and the effects of fire suppression are different from those of their west-side counterparts. In this study, our goals were (1) to use spatially-explicit forest reconstruction methods to estimate the historical, fire-adapted structure of eastern Sierra Jeffrey pine forests; (2) to describe the structural changes observed after 54–65 years of fire exclusion; and (3) to quantify the structural effects and restoration potential of 1–2 recent fire events that followed the fire exclusion period. At two sites in the Eastern Sierra near Mammoth Lakes, CA, we surveyed stands and collected tree ring series to establish tree ages and reconstruct maps of the forest at the end of the frequent-fire period (1941), after the period of fire exclusion (1995/2006), and in recent years (2018). We found that half a century of fire exclusion led to denser stands with fewer, smaller openings and larger clumps of trees, much like in the western Sierra. However, east-side forests were not as departed from fire-adapted conditions, and 1–2 fire events in recent years showed potential to restore many structural characteristics to their prior state. Our results can inform forest management decisions, and they support the use of prescribed fire and managed wildfire in forest restoration. [Display omitted] •Historical forests here were less dense, with smaller tree-clumps and larger gaps.•Eastern Sierra Jeffrey pine forests are not as departed as many western US forests.•Low productivity and shorter fire exclusion period may have limited forest changes.•Return of fire after ∼60 years restored aspects of active-fire forest structure.
 
Virmani, R., Mason, D., & Suarez, M. (2025). (Re)claiming sacred spaces: Male educators of color speaking truth to power in the classroom. In Building Community to Center Equity and Justice in Mathematics Teacher Education (Vol. 6, pp. 315–330).
This new volume of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) Professional Book Series provides mathematics teacher educators practical ideas of how to build community to center conversations and action on equity and justice in mathematics teacher education. This 24-case collection of experiences from mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) expresses how they build community in the following kinds of settings in order to provide examples of how this work can be done in a variety of MTE contexts: Cases to Build Community with Prospective Teachers; Cases to Build Community in Professional Development with Practicing Teachers; and Cases to Build Community with Graduate Students and Fellow Mathematics (Teacher) Educators. This book is written from and with a critical, practitioner stance and provides a variety of research-based cases (e.g., scenarios, tasks, modules, activities) to support MTEs to build community in mathematics teacher education courses and professional development collaborations. Creating learning communities that center on the joy, beauty, resiliency and variety of experiences and ways of knowing community members, particularly marginalized communities, is critical to promote agency and action that can support critical conversations that disrupt oppression in mathematics and mathematics teacher education. 
 
Smeds, E. A., Cooper, Z., & Bentley, L. P. (2025). lacunr: Efficient 3D lacunarity for voxelized LiDAR data from forested ecosystems. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 
Structural complexity has been considered a key driver of ecological phenomena in forested ecosystems. Geographic metrics that attempt to summarize the heterogeneity of complex 3‐dimensional (3D) spatial structures, such as fractal dimension and rugosity, provide insights into ecological processes such as biodiversity, productivity and resilience. Lacunarity is a popular metric for quantifying the spatial heterogeneity of 2‐dimensional data via determining the texture associated with patterns of spatial dispersion. Given the widespread availability of 3D remote sensing data, it is beneficial to increase the scaling efficiency of existing computational algorithms to make lacunarity calculations feasible for voxelized LiDAR data. We present an open‐source software package ‘lacunr’, written in the R programming language, which allows for efficient calculation of 3D lacunarity using LiDAR point clouds, with specific emphasis on forest stands. It includes tools to process point clouds into voxel data and 3D spatial maps and facilitates rapid visualization of lacunarity curves via built‐in plotting functions. ‘lacunr’ is applicable to LiDAR data regardless of collection method (e.g. terrestrial or airborne), as it only requires a point cloud with XYZ data for use. This makes it accessible for a wide range of users, specifically ecologists and foresters. ‘lacunr’ can easily be integrated into existing data‐analysis workflows for LiDAR data and removes a significant computational barrier previously hindering calculations of lacunarity using 3D point clouds.
 
Quinn, C. A., Burns, P., Jantz, P., Salas, L., Goetz, S. J., & Clark, M. L. (2024). Soundscape mapping: understanding regional spatial and temporal patterns of soundscapes incorporating remotely-sensed predictors and wildfire disturbance. Environmental Research. Ecology, 3(2), 25002.
Increased environmental threats require proper monitoring of animal communities to understand where and when changes occur. Ecoacoustic tools that quantify natural acoustic environments use a combination of biophony (animal sound) and geophony (wind, rain, and other natural phenomena) to represent the natural soundscape and, in comparison to anthropophony (technological human sound) can highlight valuable landscapes to both human and animal communities. However, recording these sounds requires intensive deployment of recording devices and storage and interpretation of large amounts of data, resulting in large data gaps across the landscape and periods in which recordings are absent. Interpolating ecoacoustic metrics like biophony, geophony, anthropophony, and acoustic indices can bridge these gaps in observations and provide insight across larger spatial extents and during periods of interest. Here, we use seven ecoacoustic metrics and acoustically-derived bird species richness across a heterogeneous landscape composed of densely urbanized, suburban, rural, protected, and recently burned lands in Sonoma County, California, U.S.A., to explore spatiotemporal patterns in ecoacoustic measurements. Predictive models of ecoacoustic metrics driven by land-use/land-cover, remotely-sensed vegetation structure, anthropogenic impact, climate, geomorphology, and phenology variables capture landscape and daily differences in ecoacoustic patterns with varying performance (avg. R 2 = 0.38 ± 0.11) depending on metric and period-of-day and provide interpretable patterns in sound related to human activity, weather phenomena, and animal activity. We also offer a case study on the use of the data-driven prediction of biophony to capture changes in soniferous species activity before (1–2 years prior) and after (1–2 years post) wildfires in our study area and find that biophony may depict the reorganization of acoustic communities following wildfires. This is demonstrated by an upward trend in activity 1–2 years post-wildfire, particularly in more severely burned areas. Overall, we provide evidence of the importance of climate, spaceborne-lidar-derived forest structure, and phenological time series characteristics when modeling ecoacoustic metrics to upscale site observations and map ecoacoustic biodiversity in areas without prior acoustic data collection. Resulting maps can identify areas of attention where changes in animal communities occur at the edge of human and natural disturbances.
 
Gutiérrez, R., Ortega, O., Lahme, B., & Ford, B. (2025). I was scared and excited to do the work: rehumanizing mathematics through lesson study at a Latine-serving institution. International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, 14(5), 73–88.

Mathematics instructors seek to address the well-being of students who are Indigenous, Black and Students of Color who have experienced mathematics classrooms as harmful spaces. Lesson study (LS), which engages multiple instructors at once, is a viable tool for enacting institutional change. This study investigates one US university mathematics and statistics department implementing a rehumanizing mathematics (RM) framework and especially how one AfroLatina member experienced the work. Changes in their instruction sought to better support Latine students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The study sought to understand what meaning faculty members made of their work.

Kirsch, R. E., & Ray, E. (2025). Bunkerization as a fantasy of consumer sovereignty: The politics of American disaster preparation. Thesis Eleven, 189(1), 54–69. 
This paper theorizes “bunkerization” as an organizing principle in American society that emerged after the atomic bombings of Japan and continues through contemporary crises. Bunkerization reconfigures domestic space as a defensive fortress through consumer choices, inverting Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty from “the sovereign is he who decides in the exception” to “the sovereign is he who is decided by the exception.” Three key arguments are advanced: (1) bunkerization explains how Americans oriented themselves post-1945 and manifests distinctively in American society; (2) bunkerized society transforms citizens into consumer-sovereigns managing personal micro-states while maintaining American identity; and (3) this consumer sovereignty fantasy reveals how America conceptualizes its katechontic function—restraining apocalypse while envisioning post-collapse futures. Bunkerization is critiqued as a neoliberal fantasy that individualizes collective threats, making them manageable through market choices rather than collective action, leaving citizens to purchase their way to an illusory safety.

Turner, A. A., Clark, M. L., Salas, L., Seymour, C., Snyder, R. L., … Taljaard, P. (2025). BioSoundSCape: A bioacoustic dataset for the Fynbos Biome. Scientific Data, 12(1), Article 1432. 
Most biodiversity data are collected at fine spatial scales, but threats to species and ecosystems occur at broad spatial scales. Remote sensing allows broad-scale assessment of biodiversity but these data need to be ground-truthed with contemporaneous in situ datasets. Various faunal groups produce sounds or vocalizations which can then be related to remotely-sensed data. As part of the NASA-led BioSCape project, the BioSoundSCape project deployed Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs), which record sounds in an approximately 50 m radius, at 521 sites spread across an area of approximately 119,058 km 2 in the Greater Cape Floristic Region, South Africa, during the wet and dry seasons of 2023. The ARUs recorded sounds one in every ten minutes, over 4–10 days, producing 825,832 minutes of recordings (approximately 400,000 minutes of recording in each season). These sound data are georeferenced to within 20 m, with time and date information, so may be useful for relating biodiversity patterns in soundscapes to vegetation structure, fire history, plant phenology, distance to roads and other human infrastructure.