People

Forest managers are faced with the daunting task of mitigating increased susceptibility to wildfire and drought, while minimizing impacts to other forest ecological components (e.g., wildlife, aquatic systems). My research seeks to provide a sound scientific basis for this critical area. One focal area of my research is to robustly characterize interactions of fire and landscape-level vegetation patterns. This involves investigating not only how fire influences vegetation patterns, but also how vegetation and fuel influence fire. Given the disruption of natural fire regimes in many western North American forests, historical ecological information is often used as a reference to assess departure in fire-vegetation interactions for contemporary forests. I conducted several studies in this area and will continue to do so as new reference information becomes available. This includes continuing to investigate contemporary reference sites, which are often in remote wilderness areas where natural fire regimes have been restored for several decades. Studying these areas has been particularly informative because there is greater data availability relative to historical reconstructions. Another major focal area of my research is on forest management strategies for mitigating impacts of large wildfires and other large-scale disturbances (e.g., drought-related tree mortality). While a majority of my work has been focused on strategies that can be done before these disturbances, I am currently involved in studies investigating strategies for post-disturbance forest recovery.