Kees Hood is a third-year undergraduate majoring in Evolution, Ecology, and Biodiversity and minoring in Landscape Restoration and History. He is interested in human impacts on the environment over historical and recent time, and how knowledge of the past can inform conservation and restoration efforts. He is also interested in ways to make human-dominated landscapes more habitable for wildlife, particularly through the inclusion of native plants in gardens and green spaces. He is the co-founder of a student organization, the Davis Rewilding Society, dedicated to creating a more biodiverse urban environment and fostering a better understanding of California’s biodiversity among students and the general public.
Kees has investigated a variety of research topics. He is currently working with the Karp lab on a project investigating the interactions between climate and land-use on avian nesting. In other groups, he has helped assessed the effectiveness of USDA funded pollinator habitat and the adaptations of Streptanthus wildflowers across a climatic gradient.