Decoding Earth’s evolving ecosystems

I grew up in Georgia and Minnesota and went to undergrad in Upstate New York, where I majored in biology and had fieldwork opportunities that proved to be pivotal for me. I was really interested in fire ecology, and I went to the Fynbos ecosystems in South Africa, where you can walk around these landscapes and see how the different fire histories affect the entire ecosystem – what animals are there, what plants are there, the color of the soil, everything. 

I had an equally illuminating field experience in Costa Rica studying canopy plant species as well as in Mongolia, where I looked at invertebrate paleontology and reef development following disturbances. All of those experiences made me realize that ecology was a field with an amazing potential to ask interesting questions.

My work tries to understand the response of ecosystems to disturbances like wildfires, overgrazing, droughts, and disease outbreaks by looking at a number of different factors, such as changes in the storage and fluxes of carbon and nutrients. This involves a range of research topics that span from the basic science side and understanding the fundamentals of a system to how we can do something actionable that can help humans.

One area of work that my group is interested in is the role of fire management and mitigating wildfire risk. There’s been a lot of research trying to understand the economic cost of fire management, the carbon cost of fire management, and what avoided wildfires even look like. A key piece of our efforts involves putting together a series of datasets on field experiments covering three decades of fire management and then pairing those data with satellite measurements of fire intensity and severity to determine how prescribed burning or thinning of the forest changes fuel. We can then begin to extrapolate what happens if we manage areas of the forest in the same ways and how that helps us understand the future severity of a wildfire. This is the first time that we’re answering these questions with rigorous data, which I think is really exciting.

Another component of my research involves mapping changes in wildfires in peatlands. Peatlands cover a small portion of the global land area, but they account for a large portion of total soil carbon stocks. Protecting them is essential because they’re a net carbon sink, meaning they’re helping us out in the fight against climate change. But when they dry and it’s really hot, they can burn. And when they burn, you see large spikes in carbon emissions. Historically, a lot of the emissions have come from tropical peatlands. But over the last few years, many more fire events have occurred in northern peatlands, and as a consequence, the emissions from peatland fires have outpaced the tropics. So we’re collaborating with another professor in the Department of Earth System Science to do what we call near-real-time estimates of carbon emissions from peatlands.

I was drawn to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability because my work became increasingly interdisciplinary and applied, and Stanford is building a critical mass of people that are specialists on the different components of the systems that I could never hope to specialize in myself. So I think it’s providing a great opportunity to take my work, add on other people’s expertise, and really springboard it to a new level. 

– As told to John Replogle