Mel Figueroa brings nearly 15 years of expertise and experience in traditional ecological knowledge and community-based natural resource management to her work as the Conservation Director for California Open Lands. A PhD Candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley, she has conducted fieldwork with traditional communities in North and South America, including in the lower Amazon River basin studying traditional agroforestry and burning practices to create the carbon-rich, biochar-based anthropogenic soils known as terra preta. For the last three years in Butte County, she has worked closely with Ali Meders-Knight to create a Tribal TEK certification and workforce development program, as well as partner with local and federal agencies on planning, project development, and contracting for Tribally led restoration, fuels management, and climate adaptation projects throughout the northern Sierra Nevada region. Mel and Ali are strong policy advocates for the inclusion of TEK and Tribal co-stewardship in public lands management throughout California, serving on an advisory committee for the US Forest Service Tribal Relations Strategic Planning Team in Region 5, which collaborates with Tribal practitioners and agency staff to expand opportunities for  Tribal co-stewardship on National Forest lands in California.

As an academic geographer studying agroecology, food sovereignty, and urban food justice, her research explores the socio-ecological aspects of food systems and responses to climate change within marginalized urban communities in the US and Latin America. Her work is fundamentally aimed at highlighting possibilities for innovative solutions to the multiple & compounded crises faced by excluded communities. She also specializes in economic history, political economy & globalization, urban studies, critical & postcolonial theory, the African Diaspora in the New World, and the dynamics of global crisis and popular revolt in the post-2008 period.