Lab News!

Congratulations to Alex Bentley, who was awarded the USGS-NWCASC graduate student fellowship for this work on tree decline and mortality in southwest Oregon! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Big Kudos to former grad Alec Dyer, who just published his paper on delayed tree mortality and its impacts on fire refugia and seed dispersal following the 2020 Oregon wildfires!   (here and here) 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 

The media has been showcasing the paper! here , here, & here.

Felicitaciones! to Paola Arroyo-Vargas, former PhD student in our lab, and now a postdoc at UFRO in Chile, who gave a bilingual interview with Andrés for the Fire Ecology journal podcast! (here) 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Congrats to Alex Bentley, who received an Honorable Mention in this year's competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Congratulations to Julia Alcalá, senior in ESM and ITECK, supported by PSU's LSAMP and working on her honors thesis on Indigeneous burning in wet forests in the PNW, who accepted a Research Assistanship for her MA in Anthropology at Boise State University. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

The Lab presented at the  Northwest Scientific Association 2025 Annual Meeting last week (03/18-19/25) in Eugene, OR:

Alex Bentley gave a talk on "Identifying the Drivers Behind the Decline and Dieback of Douglas-fir and True Fir Species in SW Oregon". 

Tatjana Beck presented her poster on "Wildfire Impacts on Avian Community Assemblages in the Conifer Forests of the Western Cascades in Oregon, USA." Tatjana was awarded the second-best poster in the grad student category. Kudos!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Andrés Holz gave a talk on Isaac Ball's behalf on "Monitoring and Modeling Legacy Tree Response to Restoration Treatments in the Klamath Mountains, Oregon, USA"

Andrés Holz co-authored a poster presented by Niamh Houston (MS in Geography at UO and collaborator in our NWCASC reburn project) titled "Assessing Post-fire Fuels and Vegetation Following Reburns in the Western Cascade Range of Oregon."

Former Lab member, Dr. Paola Arroyo-Vargas, translated her PhD work to park managers in southern Chile. 👏🏼

The GEC Lab is excited to welcome Halima Najihi, a research scholar who will be working on postfire and post-reburn modeling in the western Oregon Cascades (USGS-NWCASC). 

Kudos to Marcelo Castro and Juan Paritsis, Argentinean collaborators who led the work in drier Argentinean ecotonal Araucaria forests on postfire regeneration patterns and drivers!👏👏👏

Congratulations to Paola for her new m.s. on post-reburn regeneration patterns and drivers in Araucaria-Nothofagus forests in southern Chile! 👏👏👏

Congrats to Kyla for her marvelous defense and publication of her first chapter in Frontiers! 👏👏👏

Research Assistant position on postfire modeling -- Apply here!

Tatjana was awarded the Dept of Geography's Rockie Scholarship--kudos!! 👏👏👏

Andrés was interviewed on the effects of the 2021 heatwave on that same year's fire season.

BIG Kudos to Alec for his successful MS thesis defense! 👏👏👏  All the very best in your new life chapter!

Congratulations to Sebastian for publishing his second PhD dissertation chapter in Ecosphere!

Congratulations to Paola for her new Postdoctoral position! at the Universidad de la Frontera in Temuco, Chile.

Congratulations to Sebastian! for his new position at The Nature Conservancy.

The GEC Lab is happy to welcome Tatjana Beck! Tatjana is a new MS student that will be studying bird populations in response to historic wildfires at the HJ Andrews, in collaboration with Matt Betts (OSU).

Congratulations to Buzz and collaborators (Steve Perakis, Dan Gavin, Alan Tepley, and Rob Scheller) for our new NWCASC award! 👏👏👏

Andrés was interviewed CNN-Chile for the severe 2024 wildfire season (In Spanish here) and gave a plenary talk in the Research Collaboration Nextwork (Firewall) supported by the Chilean Science Foundation (ANID).

2024 👆

Congrats to Robbie Andrus for leading the Western Redcedar decline work, recently published in the Journal of Biogeography.

Big congratulations to Paola on her stellar dissertation defense! 👏👏  

The GEC Lab is happy to welcome Alex Bentley! Alex is an incoming graduate student starting Fall 2023 to continue the lab's research on tree growth under management and climate change in SW Oregon.

Congratulations to Paola, Alec, Alex, and Andrés for presenting at the 2023 Ecological Society of America Conference in Portland, Oregon.  

Shoutout to Buzz! for accepting a postdoctoral research position in the PaleoEcology and Fire Ecology Lab with the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences at the University of Montana, as part of the NSF-funder project entitled "The Past, Present, and Future of Boreal Fire Feedbacks”.  

Huge congratulations to Taylor! for successfully defending her master's thesis on assessing groundwater dynamics to inform water resource managers’ understanding of long-term trends in streamflow for the McKenzie River.

Alec and Andrés presented their delayed tree mortality research at the Post-fire Research and Monitoring Symposium! Alec's and Andrés' (#1 & #2) presentation videos can be found online as well as their presentation files.

A warm welcome to Julia Alcalá, who is an undergraduate student in ESM, and is joining the GEC lab this winter 2023 as an NSF-REU student. She is interested in cultural burning practice and will be working on understanding the impact of fire suppression on cultural burning, and the effects of forest management on forest resilience in SW Oregon, as part of Isaac's project. 

A big welcome to Isaac Ball, who is joining the GEC lab this winter 2023! For his MS thesis, Isaac will be examining the radial growth response of trees to management (thinning) and increasingly warmer and drier conditions in SW Oregon, as part of our OWEB award with collaborator Aaron Ramirez at Reed.

Kudos to OSU's David Rupp for leading the newest chapter on Wildfire within the 2023 Oregon Climate Assememnt (OCAR) report.  Here.

Big congrats to Paola! for her first dissertation chapter publication on the effect of single and double (reburn) fire impacts on understory plant communities in Araucaria Nothofagus forests in south-central Chile. 

Congratulations to Britt Pugh! on her piece on a perspective of restoration effects on reduced fire severity in the McKenzie River Stage Zero effort. 

Kudos to Sebastian Busby! for the publication of his first dissertation chapter in Frontiers! (here) and PSU's press release.  NSF's hot topics in science and engineering showcased Summer Allen's press release on Sebastian work! cool beans!

Welcome to undergraduate students April Hersey (PSU-Bio) and Aaron Evans (OSU-NatRes), who will be participating in our new Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Opportunity, and to Desmond Willson (PSU-Bio) who will help out as research staff, in forest dendroecology and microclimate. Congratulations and welcome to the GEC Lab!

Congratulations to Cody Evers and Team on our 2020 Western Cascade Wildfire paper: "Extreme Winds Alter Influence of Fuels and Topography on Megafire Burn Severity in Seasonal Temperate Rainforests under Record Fuel Aridity". Press release available here and paper here.

Congrats again to Buzz and Cathy for our piece in PAGES on Paleoecology and Restoration in Patagonia. Also, very insightful papers in the entire issue.

Massive Congrats to Buzz for his team's PNAS piece entitled "Disentangling the last 1,000 years of human–environment interactions along the eastern side of the southern Andes (34–52 S lat.)" Paper here. 

Kudos x2! to Sebastian Busby for successfully defending his dissertation this past November and for his new postdoctoral position at the USFS with Jeremy Fried.     

Rose's work was showcased by PSU's communication office (here).

Oregon Public Radio (OPB) showcased our Nat Geo project on the southernmost tree! (here)

Rose was offered (and accepted!) an exciting new NCS scientist position with TNC here in Portland. Congrats Rose!

A very warm welcome to Taylor Salazar to the GEC Lab! 

Buzz was officially allowed by NSF to conduct some of his postdoctoral work here in the PNW (in addition to Patagonia). He is re-sampling old sediment cores and collecting brand new ones! along the western Oregon Cascades to assess postfire trajectory changes from charcoal and pollen assemblages. Way to go! 

Paola and Andrés (and the overall NSF-GSS Araucaria project) were highlighted in PSU's recent piece on international research on sustainability! 

Andrés was awarded PSU's Sustainable Researcher, which was showcased (here) and the journey to find the southernmost tree was published in National Geographic Magazine (here).

KUDOS to Kyla!, who gave an oral presentation at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting and participated in the Critical Physical Geography workshop, which created a space for participants to think through and articulate the ways in which race and equity intersect with their research, especially in terms of questions and methods associated with the biophysical domain. 

Congrats to Buzz for his dissertation paper on pehuen in J of Biogeograpphy!  

With excitement and sadness, Laura moved on in her career to a new position with the USFS, with lots of fun fieldwork and also desktop work. Kudos Laura! You will be missed!!

Andrés presented ongoing work in Patagonia (led by Kyla and Paola) at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in honor of Tom Veblen's career and legacy on vegetation dynamics in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Andrés was invited to present our spatial analysis of the drivers of high severity patterns during the Labor Day 2020 Fires in Oregon in Jon Fink's Cascadia wildfire and smoke webinar. Recorded here. Work led by Cody Evers and Sebastian Busby, with Max Nielsen-Pincus as co-author.

Big Congrats to Dana Bergstrom and colleagues for the invitation to this awesome synthesis work: Combating ecosystem collapse from the tropics to the Antarctic. Global Change Biology (Press release and paper!). PSU's press release.

Congrats to collaborator and friend Jan Bannister and colleagues for inviting me to work on their paper on the influence of microsite conditions on early performance of underplanted Nothofagus nitida seedlings when restoring degraded coastal temperate rain forests. Forest Ecology and Management (here). 

Congrats to collaborators Jessica Halofsky, GEC Lab's Buzz Nanavati & Laura Platt, and Kelly Gleason on our Wildfire chapter in: Dalton, M., and E. Fleishman, editors. 2021. Fifth Oregon Climate Assessment. Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/occri/oregon-climate-assessments/.

KUDOS to Andy McEvoy and colleagues for our recent piece on the Clackamas-watershed fires under future conditions. Very timely and informative work!

Andrés was interviewed by local news (KGW) with professors Paul Loikith (PSU-Geography) and Max Nielsen-Pincus (PSU-ESM) on the 2020 wildfires.

Big congratulations to Sebastian on his MS thesis paper on High-severity and short-interval wildfires limit forest recovery in the Central Cascade Range!

Kudos to Brian Buma and team for our first southernmost tree and forest worldwide paper! Long story short:  a wind-driven landscape!

Congratulations to Craig Welch and Ian Teh for their story and photos on the Nat Geo 'Journey to the world southernmost tree'! — Jul 22, 2020 9:35:18 PM

Congratulations to Meg Krawchuk and Garret Meigs et al. for leading great 'disturbance refugia' paper! — Jun 9, 2020 7:50:32 PM

Andrés was nominated to the 2020 Excellence in Sustainability Research (PSU) — Jun 9, 2020 5:37:40 PM

Big Congratulations to Dr. Buzz Nanavati for his prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship! — May 28, 2020 4:36:56 AM

Rose participates as panelist in 'PSU's This Moment Webinar Series' on climate and COVID. Well done! — May 15, 2020 12:07:35 AM