I am a PhD candidate in Geography at Penn State with interests in vegetation dynamics, paleoecology and landscape ecology. My current research is focused on reconstructing disturbance regimes and vegetation dynamics of mixed conifer forests in the central Sierra Nevada.

My dissertation, Multiscale Analysis of Disturbance and Vegetation Dynamics in the Central Sierra Nevada, focuses on developing and integrating high-resolution and low-resolution data sources to quantify relationships between environmental heterogeneity, disturbance regimes, climate, and vegetation change in the mixed conifer forests of the Lake Tahoe Basin in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains. This project uses multiple spatial scales (from stand to landscape) and temporal scales (from decades to millennia) of analysis and addresses three main questions:

• How are landscape level patterns of vegetation and vegetation dynamics influenced by topography, climate, disturbance, and land-use change? (I am addressing this question with historical aerial photography (1939-1998),image processing and geographic information systems (GIS) linked with a spatially explicit ca. 400-year record of fire disturbance and vegetation response reconstructed from sampled fire scarred trees and forest stands.)

• How does forest stand level composition, structure, and dynamics vary across environmental and disturbance gradients? (This part of my dissertation uses detailed stem mapping, stand structural analysis and site specific disturbance histories.)

• What is the long-term relationship between fire regimes and vegetation dynamics and how are these changes related to climatic variability? (Long term changes in fire regimes and vegetation are being reconstructed with a high temporal resolution fossil charcoal record from a sediment core.)

Sample showing fire scars

Email Matt, or see his personal web page

Back to the Vegetation Dynamics Lab Homepage