Virginia H. Dale is an ecologist seeking solutions for issues dealing with land use change, forest development after disturbances, landscape ecology, and environmental decision making. She obtained her Ph.D. in mathematical ecology from the University of Washington. She is a corporate fellow in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where she has been a staff member since 1984. She has worked on developing modeling tools and indicators for resource management, vegetation recovery subsequent to disturbances, effects of air pollution and climate change on forests, tropical deforestation, and integrating socioeconomic and ecological models of land-use change. She has also worked on the effects of land-use change in tropical Latin America, the management of rare species on military reservations, and the ecological recovery of Mount St. Helens subsequent to the 1980 eruption. She serves on advisory boards for the Environmental Protection Agency, The Nature Conservancy, the National Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, and the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. She is also editor-in-chief of the journal "Environmental Management".