Bryan Endress, Ph.D.

Associate Director of CRES/Applied Plant Ecology

Zoological Society of San Diego

Dr. Bryan Endress serves the Zoological Society of San Diego as associate director of CRES/Division of Applied Plant Ecology. Dr. Endress joined the Zoological Society in 2007 and is responsible for developing and leading new plant conservation research programs that focus on the restoration and sustainable management of at-risk species, communities, and ecosystems.

Most recently, Dr. Endress was an assistant professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Forest Science and published research on grassland and forest ecology, restoration, and sustainable resource management. His responsibilities included collaborations with public and private land management agencies that ranged in scope from local to international. Dr. Endress remains a faculty member in the newly-formed Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. He also served as a director at WildShare International, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help local communities address and solve natural resource use problems. As director of the Sustainable Palm Institute at WildShare, Dr. Endress led research projects on sustainable management that provided direction to government agencies, palm harvesting communities, and private land management organizations on palm conservation. Dr. Endress continues to serve WildShare International as a member of the board of directors.

Dr. Endress earned his bachelor’s degree in biology at Luther College and went on to earn a master’s degree in forest ecology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1997 and a Ph.D. in botany at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 2002.

With a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Research Initiative, Dr. Endress serves as the principal investigator on a study to understand the causes and consequences of exotic plant invasions on native bunchgrass grasslands in western North America. Working with the USDA Forest Service, Dr. Endress also secured a grant to study interactions between disturbances such as timber harvest, wildfire, and grazing by cattle, elk, and deer, and how these interactions affect plant communities.

He is a member of the Society for Conservation Biology and the Ecological Society of America.