Jelena is an Assistant Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Geospatial Analytics. Jelena is an interdisciplinary scientist who studies the human dimensions of landscape change through a coupled human-natural systems framework. She’s fascinated by the challenges of residential growth – why people choose to build and live where they do, the landscape spatial distribution of their choices, and the feedbacks between those choices and changing environmental conditions. Using a participatory research agenda that combines qualitative and quantitative methods with new simulation and visualization tools from geospatial analytics, Jelena studies the complex roles that sense of place, human decisions, and landscape characteristics play in natural resource challenges. Current research includes: modeling exurban growth and landscape change; integrating revealed and stated preferences in landscape change through viewshed analysis and immersive virtual environments; and coupling human and natural systems through the ecosystem services paradigm.