In Defense of Urban Habitat: Biodiversity in the Los Angeles Basin - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Recorded On: 09/16/2026

What if every project in Los Angeles helped repair one of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots? As housing mandates, invasive species, and climate extremes fragment habitat, discover how multi-scalar, multidisciplinary strategies—from ecological mapping to planting design—can transform development into restoration, producing resilient landscapes with measurable performance and cultural meaning.

Learning objectives:

Evaluate a multi-scalar, interdisciplinary method for advancing biodiversity from region to site, from spatial modelling to on-the-ground experience, and through creative collaboration between landscape architects, habitat designers, and ecological researchers.
Analyze how historic ecological mapping and the mapping of early human-landscape relationships reconstruct pre-urban systems and serve as infrastructure for contemporary habitat design in the highly developed Los Angeles Basin.
Apply habitat-based planting design strategies to create dynamic, ecologically rich, and beautiful urban gardens that respond to Southern California's unique biodiversity challenges.
Integrate historic ecological mapping and regional ecosystem sectioning into a design framework that aligns habitat performance with cultural and social values, producing landscapes that are environmentally functional and experientially meaningful.

Julia Prince, ASLA, PLA

Associate Landscape Architect

Design Workshop

Julia believes landscapes lead to transcendence. Across project types, scales and geographies, she strives to inspire connection with nature, spirit, and meaning beyond the surface level elements of design. She is a registered Landscape Architect in California, Associate, and Operations Manager at Design Workshop’s Los Angeles Studio. Through empathetic engagement with people and places, she allies client and community visions with the inherent story of the land. Julia creates thoughtful, regenerative designs that integrate ecological and cultural assets both functionally and poetically. From high-end residences to large-scale ecological restorations, Julia considers every project to be an opportunity to innovate.

Travis Longcore

Adjunct Professor

UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Travis Longcore, Ph.D., is a UCLA ecologist and geographer who has spent three decades decoding how cities work — and how they could work better for the nature within them. Senior Associate Director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, he has pioneered historical ecology as a design tool, reconstructing the Indigenous ecology of the Los Angeles River, Southern California's wetlands, and the Tijuana River Valley to inform restoration decisions today. His research on urban biodiversity gives landscape architects the scientific foundation to design places that genuinely function as habitat and connect people to pieces of wild.

Scot Pipkin, MLA

Director of Education and Engagement

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

As director of education at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Scot Pipkin orchestrates educational programs, spanning school field trips, interpretation, digital education, and community classes/tours. He was born and raised in San Diego, where he fell in love with California’s plant communities. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in geography, Scot has shared his love for the natural world across the Southwest region. This work includes guiding environmental education programs, training volunteers, developing management plans, and collaborative educational efforts. In 2012, Scot earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Arizona.