ABOUT
Krista Bonfantine grew up in the desert dreaming of becoming a marine biologist. She became a fish biologist but her disillusionment over the eradication of fish and habitats inspired her to focus on outreach and education. When Krista took a fish biology job with the U.S. Forest Service she accidentally became a wildland firefighter and her career took an unexpected twist. Almost twenty years later, with hundreds of hours of fire training, an MS in water resources, and a PhD in aquatic ecology, Krista sees fire and water science as parts of an integrated whole.
Krista founded Arid Land Innovation in 2006 to bring watershed science, community engagement, and outreach under one roof. Over the next 11 years, she led ecological monitoring and community fire planning projects throughout New Mexico and collaborated with hundreds of talented scientists, land managers, emergency planners, and community members. In 2015, she founded Field Measures and led a team of programmers to create two mobile apps to make fire monitoring more accessible. Krista’s strong commitment to service has also guided her volunteer leadership of several non-profit organizations including managing a small community-owned water utility for 12 years.
A citizen science practitioner and promoter since 1997, Krista was delighted to find a PhD that engaged the local community in measuring the effectiveness of a water management program. She and her family moved to Australia so she could study on the planet’s driest continent with a long history of community-based ecological monitoring. Krista quickly learned first-hand about the academic bias against citizen science and her project slid into slime with empirical measurements of stream biofilm replacing the involvement of local residents. Using DNA metabarcoding to measure the hidden ecological communities within the slime, her field experiment found that flow pulses in unregulated stream reaches produced changes in the stream biofilm community but the biofilms did not respond to the environmental flow prescription designed to mimic natural flows. Instead of drilling down into her existing expertise, Krista’s PhD expanded her into new territory, adding DNA metabarcoding, microbiology, and community ecology to her background in hydrology, fire ecology, forestry, and fishery biology.
The more science Krista learns, the more she recognizes the limitations of science. She believes that science should serve and unite society but instead, science often breaks down where it meets society. Krista is exploring the ‘boundary layer’ between human experience and science as another component of her PhD research. She believes that the scientific evidence that sits within databases requires the deep knowledge that sits within humans and including traditional ways of knowing and spirtuality can produce science with a soul. Together, measurements, memories, and vision can improve ecosystem management.
