Leonie Casper graduated with honors from Santa Clara University in June, with a B.S. in Environmental Science and Sustainability and Biology minors. Funded by a Clare Boothe Luce Award, her most recent work focused on the water-use efficiency of riparian species used for habitat restoration in the Sacramento River Valley. Leonie presented a technical talk of these research results at the 2025 California Society for Ecological Restoration conference, the only undergraduate that year to do so. She has also worked as a lab technician at Utah State University, assisting projects focused on emergent and submergent native plant resistance to invasive spreaders. Through a collaboration with the County of Santa Clara and East San Jose garden Veggielution, Leonie helped develop a South Bay Food Systems Data dashboard, with contributions including creating community-accessible visualizations through ArcGIS technologies.
Areas of expertise: GIS, wetland and riparian restoration ecology, invasive species management, sustainable food systems