Research Background

I am a researcher managing a network of 50 separate wildfires and 50 matched unburnt control areas occurring across the near climatic extent of Sweden’s boreal forests during the extreme fire season of 2018. This network has produced an abundance of field data covering multiple metrics of fire severity and their relation to microbial and plant community interactions with carbon and nutrient cycling.  Publications derived from the effort have offered strong support for the following:

1. Climate is important for determining forest fuel characteristics and interacts with wildfire to determine carbon and nitrogen emissions as well as its restructuring in residual forest material. Notably, the N-preserving characteristics of the boreal Eurasian fire regimes appears to be enhanced by mean annual temperature, resulting in greatly reduced C:N in warmer burnt soils. Read more here.  
2. Climate interacts synergistically with wildfire to restructure forests in ways that determine recovering microbial community composition and associated rates of nutrient mobilization. Reduced soil C:N and the replacement of boreal fungi with nutrient mobilizing bacterial decomposers are important for stimulating transition towards faster growing, more temperate vegetation under regional warming. Read more here.
3. Enhancements in net primary production will likely not keep pace with increased soil decomposition under warming due to restrictions on plant community turnover and resulting biodiversity limitations. This can present significant delays in the return of burnt forests to carbon sinks, shifting carbon balance to the atmosphere. Read more here.

Also, read about the importance of subterranean wildfire mobilization of carbon here and a general background to boreal wildfire biogeochemical cycling here.

Current Work

Currently, I am working to upscale field data from the sampled fires to provide a 10 meter resolution national emissions map for the 2018 fire season based upon freely available climate and forest drainage data. This will provide significant improvements to generally limited constraints on boreal groundfire emissions.

Secondly, I am working with isotope fractionation and infrared spectroscopy to reconstruct time-of-fire burn conditions to better determine the energetic factors that influence the patterns of forest transformation determinant of recovery trajectory.

My responsibility for the field sites will soon end, but continued study is strongly encouraged. Please feel free to be in contact regarding interest in utilizing the plot network and its current plethora of data for further development.

Past Experience

Please see LinkedIn for more detail.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy in Geobiosphere Science, Lund University
• Masters in Synchrotron Radiation Based Science, MAX IV, Lund, Sweden
• Bachelor in Chemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara 
• Bachelor in Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara

Research

The bulk of my prior research experience exists in the fields of physics and engineering but have had small contributions to restoration ecology throughout my early academic career.

High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL) - with the conception of increased luminosity at the LHC an upgrade is underway for the CMS experiment at CERN. Scintillator material in highly forward endcap regions is being replaced with more radiation hard, high granularity silicon pad detectors. This can lead to, for example, better shower resolution in high pile-up missing momentum searches. My role was in development at the individual detector level.

Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) – groundbreaking advancement in detector and simulation technology has motivated experimental light dark matter searches such as LDMX. I had worked on granularity studies and detector development.

BioMAX - provided assistance as an end station engineer for the macromolecular crystallography beamline BioMAX at MAX IV.

MAX IV - investigating silicon double crystal monochromator diffraction under various crystal orientations and strained states. Publication in progress.

Personal

I grew up in the coastal mountains outside Los Angeles and have spent a healthy portion of my life climbing and exploring the Sierra Nevadas. It's all been pretty cool.