As an ecologist, I study wildland fuel science, ecosystem modeling, and ecosystem restoration to see how natural processes affect the landscape.
Patience and stubbornness are important to my research. It takes quite a long time for the effects of any project, such as restoration or a fuel treatment, to become visible. As a scientist, you have to have the personality that takes things in stride.
How do you restore the whitebark pine ecosystem? Whitebark pine is a tree that is important to the ecosystem in which it lives. The whitebark pine population is rapidly declining because of an exotic disease, beetle outbreaks, and the lack of fire.
We use a backpack-mounted Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) unit. The LIDAR unit quantifies the amount of canopy from forest trees that is fuel, or burnable material, in a wildland fire.
I discovered that variability, or differences in condition, in ecology promotes diverse ecosystems. Managing for the mean, or average, conditions leads to the least amount of diversity.
I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I got my first chemistry set on my 11th Christmas.
