Franklin received her start in remote sensing as a doctoral candidate when she was recruited by a professor on the basis of her ability to distinguish different species of pine tree from aerial photographs.[6]
In 1988, Franklin began teaching and researching at San Diego State University, where she remained until 2009. Her 1995 paper, Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modeling of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients, is considered a foundational work of modern, remote sensing-based landscape ecology. In 2009, she was appointed as a professor of geography at Arizona State University, becoming a Regent's Professor in 2015.[7] From 2014 to 2016, she was president of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology.[1] Some of her research has focused on island ecosystems in the West Indies and Polynesia. In 2017, she was appointed to the University of California Riverside.[2]
Franklin's work focuses on the use of remote sensing techniques to model and understand vegetated landscapes.[6] She has made significant contributions to the study of human-caused landscape change and predictive vegetation mapping.[8][9] In recent years, much of her work has focused on climate change, both present and historical.[10][11][12]
Franklin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences[1] and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Ecological Society of America.[13] She is also the current editor-in-chief of Diversity & Distributions, a highly ranked journal on conservation biogeography.
