Janet Franklin

Janet Franklin served as Regents’ Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning from 2015 to 2017, after joining as Professor in 2009. She concurrently held a professorship in the School of Life Sciences from 2009 to 2012 and remained an Adjunct Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning until 2020. Franklin earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988, an M.A. in Geography from the same institution in 1983, and a B.A. in Environmental Biology in 1979 with high honors. Her academic career prior to ASU included positions at San Diego State University, where she advanced from Assistant Professor to Professor in Geography and Biology departments.

Franklin’s research focuses on conservation biogeography, global change biology, species distribution modeling, landscape ecology, plant community ecology, spatial ecology, and geographic information science. At ASU, she examined terrestrial plant community dynamics at landscape scales, employing remote sensing, satellite imagery, GIS, and spatial statistics to analyze human impacts—including agriculture, urbanization, land use change, and altered fire regimes—on ecosystems. Her contributions include innovative species distribution models, multi-scale analyses linking climate, land use, and disturbances to habitat loss and species declines, and tools for forecasting landscape responses to global change. She published over 120 refereed papers, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and National Geographic Society, and collaborated with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey. Key works include the book Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction (Cambridge University Press, 2010), “Global change and terrestrial plant community dynamics” (PNAS, 2016), and “Achieving climate connectivity in a fragmented landscape” (PNAS, 2016). Franklin’s influence extends to sustainability science through roles as Senior Sustainability Scientist (2010–2014) and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist (2014–2017) at ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. Major honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences (2014), ASU Regents’ Professor (2015), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2015), and Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (2015).