Lab News
March 2013
Jesse Morris presented a talk titled "How can pollen and geochemical evidence from lake sediments provide context for the climate-mediated bark beetle outbreak occurring in Western North America?" at the Pacific Climate Group Workshop in Pacific Grove, California.January 2013
Phil presented a talk titled "The changing nature of fire-climate relationships in the U.S. Northern Rockies, 1902-2008" at the VII Southern Connections Congress, in Dunedin, New Zealand.
As part of the WildFIRE PIRE project, Phil, Jesse Morris, recent U Idaho graduate Conamara Burk, and Australian collaborators completed a successful field campaign collecting sediment records of past fire and vegetation change in the Central Plateau of Tasmania. View photos from the trip.
December 2012
Adam Young presented a poster at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Fransisco, titled "Quantifying the historic and future distribution of fire in Alaskan tundra and boreal forest ecosystems."
View poster
November 2012
(1) Welcome to Dr. Kelly Derr, who will be starting a postdoctoral position in the lab, in January 2013! Kelly defended her dissertation in the Anthropology Department at Washington State University, on 11/14. Her dissertation work focused on understanding resource use, including anthropogenic fire, by precontact coast Salish of southwestern British Columbia.
(2) Welcome to Dr. Jesse Morris, who will be starting a postdoctoral position in the lab, in January 2013! Jesse received his PhD from the University of Utah in 2011, where he used lake sediments to study Holocene vegetation and disturbance history in southern Utah, including fire and insect outbreaks. Jesse has been working as a postdoc as the University of Helsinki, Finland.
(3) Congratulations to Kerry Kemp and her IGERT teammates for putting on a series of successful climate change workshops. You can read about their workshop in Missoula and Boise, both of which made front-page news in the respective cities:
Idaho Statesman (click here)
Missoulian (click here)
(4) Paper accepted for publication in Environmental Research Letters lead by Notre Dame colleague Adrian Rocha, titled "The footprint of Alaskan tundra fires during the past half-century: implications for surface properties and radiative forcing."
(5) Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences lead by former MS student Nolan Brewer, titled "Fuel Moisture Influences on Fire-altered Carbon in Masticated Fuels: An Experimental Study."
October 2012
Paper accepted for publication in Global Ecology and Biogeography, lead by WildFIRE-PIRE colleague Dave McWethy, titled "A conceptual framework for predicting temperate ecosystem sensitivity to human impacts on fire regimes."
September 2012
Paper accepted for publication in Ecology, lead by Univ. of Illinois PhD student Carolyn Barrett, titled "Climatic and land-cover influences on the spatiotemporal dynamics of Holocene boreal fire regimes."
August 2012
Paul Dunnette presented a poster at the Aug. ESA meeting: Fire and biogeochemical cycling.May 2012
Congratulations Paul Dunnette and Kerry Kemp!
Paul and Kerry were each recently awarded a Stillinger Trust Forest Science Research Fellowship, from the University of Idaho's Office of Research. The fellowship provides a 12-month research assistantship for Paul and Kerry to complete and continue their graduate research.
April 2012
Congratulations to Kerry Kemp!
Kerry recently received a JFSP Graduate Research Innovation Award, for her proposal titled "Interactions among climate, wildfire, and tree regeneration at lower treeline in the Northern Rockies." The award provides $25 k over the next two years.
Congratulations to Adam Young!
Adam was recently awarded a NSF-GK12 fellowship for 2012-2013. Adam was also selected to attend the 2012 International Arctic Research Center Summer School Course on Climate System Modeling, in Fairbanks Alaska.