Alan Ager
DR. ALAN AGER, USFS
ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESEARCH STATION
“PRODUCTION POSSIBILITY FRONTIERS AND TRADEOFFS AMONG ECOSYSTEM SERVICES FROM FOREST RESTORATION”
Alan Ager is a research forester at the USDA Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula Montana. Dr. Ager received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in forest genetics and studied the genecology of red alder in the Pacific Northwest. He began his career with the Forest Service in 1987 as a landscape planner and has worked on a wide range of natural resource management problems. His recent efforts have focused on wildfire risk management and modeling alternative future forest management scenarios with agent-based models. Most recently, Ager combined simulation modeling with network analysis to disentangle wildfire risk transmission among federal, state, and private lands. As part of effort, Ager teamed up with social scientists to explore a socio-ecological systems approach to improve wildfire mitigation planning. They demonstrated scale mismatches in the current US community wildfire protection planning caused by poor integration of social and biophysical factors that contribute to risk and risk perception. In other recent work, Ager and coworkers described the use of spatial optimization and production possibility frontiers to understand tradeoffs among ecosystem services from forest restoration programs on western national forests. He has developed several spatial planning systems that are widely used by Forest Service planners and by researchers interested in wildfire modeling and risk assessment. He has lectured on wildfire risk analysis and simulation modeling throughout the US and held guest research positions at multiple universities in Europe.