University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 

Lucia Fitts-Vargas is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota working on adaptation planting projects in the Great Lakes region that are focused on climate change or novel disturbance adaptation. Her goal is to investigate the state of the practice (what are different agencies and stakeholders doing) towards these efforts and identify on-the-ground projects to collect quantitative data that will help her evaluate each project's success, what characterizes these successes, and the individual species response based on how far the seed sources came from.

She earned a Ph.D. in Natural Resources Science and Management with a minor in Geographic Information Sciences. Her doctoral research focused on modeling land use change, biomass, and forest carbon dynamics in the United States as well as on the use and validation of landscape simulation models (LANDIS-II) with forest inventory data (US FIA). She earned a Forestry BSc. and a Forest engineering degree from Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina in Peru. While working in Peru, she focused her research in community forestry in the Amazon, where she studied the perceived impacts of timber and non-timber forest management in the Sinchi Roca I native community.

Dr. Fitts also has an international and interdisciplinary background. She earned an Erasmus+ scholarship which took her to the University of Turku, Finland for 9 months. She has wide fieldwork experience in different parts of the world working with people from different cultures and backgrounds.