Narrative

My informal introduction to geography began on family car trips across the United States, tours of Europe, and adventures in my own backyard in rural New England. My parents passed on to my sister, brother, and me a love of the out-of-doors and an interest in understanding the varied landscapes around us. During my first term as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College I finally discovered that geography was a subject I could study formally, major in, and pursue as a career.

My broad teaching and research interests involve biophysical systems of the environment and people-environment relationships. For several years, my research has focused on understanding the dynamics and disturbance regimes of white pine in southwestern Wisconsin, hemlock-hardwood forests in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and deciduous forests and oak savannas in southern Minnesota. In the Adirondacks, I reconstructed the natural disturbance regime for a 140-year period from tree-ring evidence, and also compared the structural attributes and disturbance regime of old growth with those characteristics of nearby second-growth stands that regenerated following logging-related fires in the early 1900s.

I am monitoring long-term regeneration patterns in a 36-hectare area that burned near Keene Valley, NY. The mountainside (800 m above sea level) was covered with a spruce–fir–birch forest prior to the fire in 1999. Now it is an aspen stand, even though aspen typically grows at lower elevations.  Climate change and chance events may help explain the new forest composition.

I am fascinated by the overlapping influence that climate at a broad scale and disturbance at a local scale have in shaping vegetation.  My current projects in the Big Woods deciduous forest and oak savanna of Minnesota test hypotheses about the influence of climate and fire on tree recruitment.

Students working with me have pursued research on the relationships between spruce budworm outbreaks, climate, and management practices in spruce–fir forests at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota; disturbance history and recruitment patterns in old-growth forests; fire history in oak savannas; land use and conservation in the blufflands and karst region of southeastern Minnesota; and climate–fire interactions at the Uluguru biodiversity hotspot in Tanzania. I advise students in Geography and in Conservation Biology.