Who am I? I am a geoscientist
with experience and interests in climate and forest dynamics, Holocene
processes, and environmental change. My long-term scientific goal is to
understand climate processes affecting forest growth at multi-annual timescales
in current, past, and future environments. I pursue this goal using natural
archives such as tree rings. My scientific background and interests are
at the intersection between geography, ecology, and geology.
What are my recent activities? In summer 2000 I joined the Geography Faculty at the University of Nevada in Reno to teach and conduct research in the areas of climatology, dendrochronology, and quantitative methods. My dissertation work on forest growth trends in Arizona had both regional and global relevance. Regionally, it provided evidence for the impact of fire suppression on the ecology of southwestern conifer forests, ultimately contributing to landscape conservation plans. Globally, it showed the importance of placing twentieth-century patterns into a longer historical perspective to disentangle the impact of land use changes (in this case, European settlement) from stand dynamics and other factors. From 1994 to 2000 I conducted research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography on past climate using proxy records from terrestrial tree rings and oceanic sediments (varves). Based on such records, I have suggested that sudden inter-decadal change occurred near A.D. 1600 over marine and land systems of the American West Coast. At Scripps I also established a research program in dendroclimatology, and assembled the tree-ring laboratory that I have now transferred to UNR. My most recent studies deal with the reconstruction of climate variability from mountain and treeline ecosystems in the Great Basin of North America, in central Mexico, and in Italy. Special emphasis is placed on quantifying responses to disturbance (wildfire, land use changes) in relation to climate and to the distribution of woody species at the watershed level.
As public and private management agencies strive to develop robust indicators of changing ecological state at multiple temporal scales, tree-ring records hold great promise because they provide long, continuous, and absolutely dated information on annual tree growth. Dendrochronology is an ideal tool for clearly understanding the natural range of variability in environmental patterns and processes, and this long-term information can reduce uncertainty associated with risk assessment.
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