FIELD RESEARCH / PUBLIC TOOLS / NATURE STORYTELLING
Making nature easier to notice, understand, and act on.
I build practical tools, field guides, and public-facing stories that connect people with ecoregions, native plants, seed libraries, climate conditions, and place. I use technology where it helps—and human observation where it matters.
Explore Nature WorkMeet Ilana at Climate Week
Nature is local. The information people need rarely is.
Useful knowledge is scattered across maps, agencies, scientific sources, community programs, and lived experience. I turn that complexity into public tools and stories: a way to find your ecoregion, a clearer path to free community seeds, a heat-aware field guide, or a record of what a South Texas garden teaches under pressure.
My work combines research, editorial judgment, product thinking, and more than twenty years of communications and program leadership.
Featured Nature Work
What Is My Ecoregion?
A privacy-conscious public tool that connects an address or landmark to the ecological landscape beneath it—and offers a better starting point for native planting, biodiversity, and local climate adaptation than a ZIP code alone.
Seed Libraries as Local Climate Infrastructure
Research and mapping of free community seed resources in San Antonio and Austin, showing how libraries can support locally appropriate growing knowledge, neighborhood resilience, and wider access to plants.
Explore the San Antonio seed-library research
A South Texas Climate Garden Lab
A home-scale field project documenting extreme-heat planting decisions, native and regionally appropriate species, germination experiments, water constraints, and the useful lessons inside failure.
Heat-Aware Urban Nature Field Guide
A Florence field guide shaped by close observation, species research, source verification, and the practical reality that climate conditions change how people safely experience a city.
Crescent Bend Nature Park
A local field guide to a former neighborhood returned to nature—now a 180-acre park where floodplain recovery, Cibolo Creek, bird blinds, woodland, and grassland share the landscape.
Explore Crescent Bend Nature Park
Bracken Cave Preserve
A conservation field guide to one of the world’s largest mammal concentrations, the protected habitat around it, and the carefully managed experience of seeing millions of Mexican free-tailed bats emerge at dusk.
How I work
Research deeply
Find the trustworthy source, the missing context, and the local detail.
Translate clearly
Turn complexity into language and tools people can use without specialist training.
Design for action
Give people a meaningful next step: observe, plant, visit, protect, participate, or ask a better question.
About Ilana
I am a researcher, storyteller, and project leader exploring how public information, practical technology, and close observation can help people build stronger relationships with nature and place.
Across more than twenty years in digital products, communications, brand growth, healthcare, and public-facing experiences, I have learned how to make complicated systems understandable—and how to move ambitious work from idea to useful reality.
Working on climate, conservation, community resilience, public gardens, environmental education, or nature access?
I would like to hear what you are building.