Shawn successfully defended his Ph.D.!
Solomon has been awarded NSF funding to study glacial refugia
Currently accepting applications for an MS position
Dobrowski (2011) and Crimmins et al. (2011) were selected for Faculty of 1000 Biology and Crimmins et al. (2011) was featured in Nature Climate Change.
Our paper on plant species' elevation shifts was published in the January 21 issue of Science. News coverage is listed here.
The focus of the Forest Landscape Ecology Lab is to understand the linkages between biophysical drivers and vegetation response, the physiological processes involved in these linkages, the spatial scales at which these linkages operate, and approaches to modeling and mapping these processes. To address these issues, the lab focuses on three core areas of research: 1) physiographic influences on climate, 2) historical and current species distributions, and 3) fire and fire effects.
We are quantifying the extent to which landscape physiography influences regional climate patterns and climate displacement rates for both temperature and water balance. We are also examining historical data and paleoecological records to assess how organisms utilized terrain to mitigate against climate changes of the Quaternary.
Our lab is interested in understanding how climate change affects species distributions. We are using historical datasets to examine past range changes and to quantify temporal niche stability to determine whether species' relationships with the environment are static over time, or if species adapt to changing environments. Our work has focused primarily on the Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) project from the early 20th century and modern analogues. These survey data are also useful for studying the reliability of species distribution models (SDMs), which have been used extensively to estimate impacts of climate change on local and global species distributions.
We are quantifying the relative role of anthropogenic, climatic, and biotic influences on fire probability in the western US using multiple modeling approaches. We are also studying the transformation, loss, and recovery of forest carbon resources due to management and wildfire.
