Berkeley Forest Ecology Lab

Lab News

The top of audience members heads in the background while a Battles lab scientist stands at a podium in front of a projected slide presenting on LiDAR research.

Two smiling women in the Battles lab stand in front of their posters at CFSS poster session.

February 19-20, 2026

Ashlyn, Helena, John, and Yihong just attended the California Forestry Science Symposium in Sacramento California where folks were able to present on their recent research, meet with collaborators, and attend an assortment of great talks.

Conceptual figure and figure legend from Zhu et al (2026) publication, figure 2.

February 11, 2026

We are delighted to share Yihong and John's new paper on the "Legacy effects under an emerging novel disturbance regime: A memory-based framework to quantify tree growth responses" in the Journal of Ecology. Congratulations!

They conceptualized the legacy effect as disturbance-induced changes in any component of ecological memory (sensitivity, length, or temporal pattern). Applying the memory-based framework, they were able to quantify the legacy effect characteristics on the co-existing dominant species in California mixed forests. They found that fire- and drought-tolerance levels track the legacy effects pattern, i.e., tree species that are less tolerant of droughts or fires had stronger or longer legacy effects. For example, ignoring the legacy effect could result in up to 4.2% overestimate in total growth of white fir in 20 years. You can check out the pub here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.70253.

February 9, 2026

We are excited to have Olaf Kuegler join the Battles lab to help with work on understanding carbon dynamics in California forests sing large-scale forest inventory and monitoring data. His background as a statistician and biomatrician for the United States Forest Service will help us better quantify forest growth, mortality, and long-term carbon change across the state.

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