Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., University of Louisville, 2016
  • B.S., Biology, Baylor University, 2011
Licenses & Certifications
  • Life Cycle Assessment: Quantifying Environmental Impacts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Professional Education
  • Project Management Professional (PMP)

Dr. Prescott is an ecologist with expertise in evaluating the impacts of anthropogenic stressors such as climate change and habitat loss on biodiversity. She combines her ecological expertise with her Project Management Professional certification to provide clients with high quality, timely ecological solutions. She has experience integrating fieldwork with data science techniques to model complex systems. She has worked with a variety of environmental data including satellite imagery, climate data, and biodiversity surveys in both terrestrial and aquatic systems. In her current role, Dr. Prescott applies her ecological understanding of biodiversity to real-world scenarios including climate change, chemical contaminants, and regulatory compliance. She is particularly interested in how commercial trade and human uses of plants and wildlife affect biological populations. 

As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Prescott critically examined the accuracy of a risk assessment tool used by resource agencies to predict species distributions under various climate change scenarios, comparing the outputs of the tool to outputs she generated using machine learning methods. This research focused on freshwater species from a variety of taxonomic groups inhabiting different geographical areas of the world, including Asian clam, silver carp, rusty crayfish, Cuban tree frog, and water hyacinth. Her research concluded that method selection drastically impacts prediction accuracy, potentially resulting in misinformed policy decisions or resource allocation.

Dr. Prescott's dissertation research combined survey data with satellite imagery data to assess odonate (dragonfly and damselfly) diversity across an urban-rural landscape and to identify the environmental factors that influence community composition. Utilizing bird survey techniques to conduct the odonate surveys, her research implemented a novel approach to surveying dragonflies. Further, Dr. Prescott has leveraged satellite imagery data to identify important habitat corridors that maintain gene flow between wolf spider populations across an urban landscape. She has also modeled extinction risk in odonate species found throughout the United States by identifying ecological traits (e.g., geographic range size and length of flight period) that correlate with NatureServe's global conservation status.