The University of Arizona

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Research

Reconstructing historical fire regimes using tree ring fire scar analysis, demography, and ecological process modeling.
Graduate students in the Public Political Ecology Lab (http://ppel.arizona.edu) received a Green Fund MiniGrant to support a free methods training for undergraduates interested in political ecology. We spent a weekend teaching qualitative and quantitative methods to project participants, including a day on Mt. Bigelow and in Summerhaven. The field research day focused on ecological changes to the forest as a result of fire management, and public perceptions of 'nature' in the Catalinas.
Sky Island Mountains of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico are the most ecologically diverse forested systems in North America. We are studying how fire, insect outbreaks, climate and human land uses drive changes in these complex systems across scales of time and space.
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