Gary A. Reese (pcacala) is an ecologist, artist and instructor in photography at the College of Southern Nevada.

Science: Gary has nationwide field experience in plant and animal inventories, natural community inventory, monitoring, and vegetation classification and mapping. Since 1974, Gary has completed field work in 12 states for four university biological research departments, two federal research agencies, four state heritage programs, various environmental consulting firms, The Nature Conservancy, and a botanical garden. He has mapped more than two million acres to U.S. National Vegetation Classification standards and coordinated 51 eco-regional or county-wide natural area and endangered species inventories. He has also used and taught field survey protocols to establish and monitor permanent vegetation plots and classify and map vegetation. His field experience includes assessment and delineation of wetlands; conducting rare bird, reptile, and amphibian inventories; and completing ecological site evaluations for more than 1,100 sites. He provided environmental reviews for state regulatory agencies, reviewed biological data for environmental impact assessment, and provided clearance surveys for development projects. Gary has published and presented twenty-five research papers on double-sampling methodology, comparing methods for determining annual plant production, remote sensing applications, rephotographic survey photography, and detecting landscape changes from cronosequenced aerial and ground imagery.

Art: Gary has curated dozens of photography exhibitions and exhibited his photography worldwide in over sixty solo and group shows. Gary has developed innovative photographic techniques to reveal change over time in cultural and biological resources. He teaches documentary photography methods in his course Photographing the Heritage of the West in the Department of Media Technologies, College of Southern Nevada. Gary has been an Instructor in Photography at that college since 2001 and has taught nine different courses in a commercial photography program, including seven for which he developed the curricula.

Gary has 30 years of experience in locating archived documents and using historical photography as a multi-disciplinary investigative tool. He is particularly adept at locating heretofore unknown or uncataloged documents. As a research associate with the Public Lands Institute at the University Nevada - Las Vegas, Gary rephotographed with a large format camera views taken along the Colorado River during the Wheeler Expedition of 1871. This included relocating the photographic viewpoints of seven photographs at Fort Mohave, Arizona, all of which depicted buildings clusters or constructed structures on the military reservation. Gary’s work in large format photography has also included his often duplicated series showing all the county courthouses in Nevada, plus photographs of the remnants of many mining camps and boomtowns in the western US. He has been the recipient of many regional and international awards for his rephotography.