Mary Lata, Fire Ecologist

My job includes teaching firefighters, speaking to communities at public events, collaborating with others on issues related to fire ecology, consulting with other land management agencies, predicting (modeling) how wildfire and prescribed fire behave, and presenting at conferences.

For me, curiosity is a driver and fuels my motivation to make sense out of multiple pieces of information. This helps me to recognize temporal and spatial patterns that define ecological processes, which helps me sort out what is happening in the natural environment.

Fire is a key disturbance to most ecosystems in the United States. No one really disputes that anymore, but social, economic, and political priorities and pressures make it difficult to prioritize ecological needs or recognize the long-and short-term impacts that should be expected.

I have a 2-meter-long tent pole that collapses into three pieces for ease of carrying and storage. Decimeters are marked on it in colored tape. It is an inexpensive, durable, convenient, and invaluable piece of equipment for measuring plant heights and distances.

Between climate change and more immediate human impacts on fire regimes, most of the land in the United States—public and private—will never reach what some would describe as a “natural” state. We need to be managing what is here now and what is coming.

In the 1990s, I worked for The Nature Conservancy on prairie restoration, which included prescribed fire. I learned a lot about hands-on land management, ecology, and fire. Having never had the opportunity to use fire before, I was intrigued. It was a “new shiny thing” for me that became my career.