A landscape fire ecologist studies how past and present forest fires spread across large areas, how the fire impacts the forest (which trees are killed and which trees survive), what trees begin to grow after the fire, and how surviving trees and the new vegetation influence how future fires spread.
Since nature changes very slowly over long time periods, it’s important to have imagination and creativity in order to see and understand these processes in your mind.
How did historical fires spread across landscapes with different topographies?
When we work in the forest, it is very important to know where you are and where you collected data (pieces of information). Therefore, we always carry maps and small computers with Global Positioning System (GPS) units that tell us where we are at all times.
Discovering how frequent and common fires were in the past and contrasting that to how now as a society we are so fearful of these events that were once part of native people’s everyday life. It kind of transfers you to another world that existed right where you are standing now.
I realized I wanted to be a scientist when I started to look at the measurements we had collected in the forest. When I started making graphs and comparing different things, I started to see how those numbers gave me clues as to how nature works.
