天美传媒

I balance cutting-edge fieldwork with analysis of global ecological data to examine how human changes to fire patterns are encouraging forest-savanna transitions, degrading ecosystems and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Together with an international community of collaborators, I work across disciplines and scales—from individual organisms to entire ecosystems.

Alistair Smith is a professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences at University of Idaho. He's an internationally recognized leader in wildland fire science and is an expert in pyroecophysiology, a new sub-field of fire ecology that he termed in 2017 that focuses on understanding how fires affect trees, why some die and, when they survive, what happens to them. His team’s research has had a major impact on changing the understanding of fire ecology, especially in the face of more intense and frequent fires under climate change.
Available to speak on: 
Forest fire ecology
Fire behavior
Smoke management

Grant Harley’s research interests lie within the broad domain of physical geography, but focus on climatology, biogeography, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction over the past ca. 2,000 years. Currently the overarching goal of Grant’s research program is focused on integrating information about current and past climatic and ecological processes to better understand how natural resources (like plant communities and water) are likely to become altered in the future due to human-induced changes. Grant uses dendrochronology and spatial analysis as research tools to investigate landscape鈥恠cale dynamics (those initiated and/or controlled by both human and natural processes), which must be tempered with a historical perspective.
Topics: climate change, drought, hot-droughts, floods, avalanches, snowpack, atmospheric rivers, wildfires, river discharge, forest ecology, insect outbreaks, dendrochronology (tree-ring science)