Collected since 2001, these images are a few of my favorites. In selecting them, my desire was to simply present some of the photographs that have been especially meaningful to me. They serve in part as a travelogue but also as records of intimate experiences with ecosystems and their wildlife. Privately, I use photography as a tool to combat the distortions that time inflicts on memory, particularly to those ephemeral encounters with an animal or the momentary intersection of sunlight, wind, and weather on a landscape. Publicly, I hope the images convey a sense of the wonderful character of their subjects.

Taken together, however, the photographs represent three landscapes that have been especially important to me. And each of these environments are fragile, threatened by variants of the same anthropogenic forces. While I did include portraits of large, charismatic mammals, I found myself drawn to pictures of smaller, vulnerable, overlooked species. Over time, I have increasingly trained my lens on birds, in part because they are the subjects of my ecological research, but they also interact with multiple habitats on broad scales and can signal the health of an ecosystem.

The first three pictures depict residents of alpine environments and boreal forests: ecosystems characterized by rock; ice; and seasonal, abundant growth. As tenacious as these animals are, climate change has made their future uncertain. As a native of the western US, I have always loved these creatures and their environments.

Its skeletal form silhouetted against an unforgiving sun, a lonely acacia leads a series of photographs from African savannas. The subject of my thesis research, tropical grasslands are hotbeds of abundance and diversity. They are also falling victim to intense human pressure: land conversion, overgrazing by livestock, and increasingly severe and frequent droughts resulting from climate change threaten these extraordinary places.

The final set of images depict coastal systems and islands, some of the most fascinating and vulnerable ecosystems on the planet. The South African coastline and the remnant coastal forests of Kenya nurture an enormous number of endemic species which are threatened by land use change. Wonderful arrays of globally unique species make their homes among the lava on the Galápagos Islands. Climate change, overfishing, land conversion, and invasive species threaten island systems worldwide.

Biography

Nathan Gregory is a PhD candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department and a Princeton Environmental Institute/ Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Fellow. His research examines how traditional pastoralism, specifically anthropogenic fire and livestock grazing, maintain bird communities in East African savannas. From 2003 through 2007, Nathan conducted fieldwork in the Laikipia District of Central Kenya and traveled throughout the country. Also during his time at Princeton, he visited Panama, Tanzania, South Africa, Ecuador and the Galapagos. Prior to starting his PhD, Nathan worked on wildlife issues in Colorado, Hawaii, and Alaska. He has a deep love for the western US; he was raised in Denver, Colorado and earned a bachelors degree in environmental biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.