As a research professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Dr. Patrick Bixler examines the governance and policy dimensions of environmental change. Patrick is engaged in work around large landscape conservation, private lands stewardship, and organizational networks and innovation. His work focuses on the intersection of ecology, economy, and governance across a range of issues relevant to landscape disturbance and land and water management. Through the lens of community- and landscape-scale conservation, he has published research on issues of forest and water conservation, wildlife management, climate adaptation, residential development, and wildfire. He is particularly interested in the role of relationships and networks that link local actions to landscape-level outcomes.
Prior to joining UT, Patrick was a faculty research associate at the University of Oregon and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation in Washington, DC. He completed his master of arts at the University of Montana (2008) and completed his PhD in Environmental Sociology at Colorado State University (2014). Patrick’s dissertation research was conducted with collaborative conservation groups in the Crown of the Continent, an 18 million acre area around Glacier National Park in Montana, British Columbia, and Alberta, where he still works closely with practitioners in the region on conservation policy and strategy. Patrick is also a Senior Fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.