Andrew Latimer Lab

Recent news

• Lab alum Paige Kouba recently accepted a postdoctoral position at Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet in their and will start in August to study boreal forest growth and forest structure. She also had her paper on her TinyCO2 system for testing CO2 effects on tree seedlings accepted for publication at Methods in Ecology & Evolution. 
• Ashley Grupenhoff's paper, "Evaluating short-term effects of fuel treatments on fuel loading in western US dry conifer forests: a meta-analysis" will go live soon at Forest Ecology & Management. 
• Chris Wong had a paper accepted looking at tree survival after fire using multispectral remote sensing: "Sentinel imagery detects the presence of live trees following large wildfires in California"
• Anika Lévy-Groth (Summer field crew member, former UC Davis undergrad) graduated from fire academy and won a $5,000 scholarship for excellence. 

Spring-Summer 2024 

• Most wildfires, even modern "megafires" burn mostly at low- to moderate severity, killing a minority of trees while reducing surface fuels. The amount of California forest landscape "treated" in this way is about 3x as large as has been treated so far by controlled burns and mechanical thinning combined. But how strongly do these wildfire effects influence the severity of later reburns? How long does their moderating influence last? In this paper, by analyzing ~700 reburns across the western US, we found the effects are strong but fade within 10-20 years, depending on the region. -- Tortorelli, C., AM Latimer, DJN Young (2024). Moderating effects of past wildfire on reburn severity depend on climate and initial severity in Western US forests. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.3023
• How predictable are forest regeneration and tree recruitment and how soon after fire can you tell whether a patch of forest is likely to return to a forested state? Most postfire surveys are done several years after fire, on the asssumption that by about 4-5 years post fire, any established tree seedlings are likely to persist, and that priority effects will make it less likely for tree seedlings to recruit later than that. By resurveying monumented plots in several NorCal fires about 10 years after their initial survey, we tracked the medium-term successional fate of these sites. We found that for pines and Douglas fir, the initial survey does in fact give us enough information to accurately predict later outcomes, but that for white fir, the story is more complex. With their greater shade tolerance, higher seed production, and longer distance dispersal, firs continue to recruit beyond the first several years.  -- Claire M Tortorelli, Derek JN Young, Matthew J Reilly, Ramona J Butz, Hugh D Safford, Nina E Venuti, Kevin R Welch, Andrew M Latimer (2024). Post-fire resurveys reveal predictability of long-term conifer recruitment in severely burned California dry forests. Forest Ecol. & Mgt. 566: 122100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2024.122100 

Spring-Summer 2024 

• Dr. Claire Tortorelli, a former lab postdoc, is now an Ecologist in the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the US Forest Service -- a great job where she gets to develop and lead research programs on fire, forest, rangeland/grazing, and non-native plants. 
• Dr. Paige Kouba filed her dissertation: "Once and Future Forests: Historical reconstructions and climate-change experiments for California pines and oaks." She is now on her way to start a new postdoc at UC Santa Cruz in F2024 with Roxanne Beltran, Erika Zavaleta, and Robin Duncan to study the effects of outdoor, engaged forms of education on student outcomes, including diversity, belonging, retention, student success. The program is called: Field-based Undergraduate Training: Utilizing Research for Equity (FUTURE) in Biology.
• Ecology PhD Student Nina Venuti was named a Public Scholar for the Future for her engaged scholarship supporting forest resilience - including resilience of both ecosystems and human communities. Meanwhile, she successfully launched her CALFIRE-funded project to digitize thousands of cone collections from historic government records and use them to model conifer phenology to support reforestation. Thousands of records spanning >50 years are already in her database, and she aims to start forecasting cone ripeness timing by June 2025! 
• Ecology PhD Student Jennifer Cribbs has launched her second ambitious field season, funded by her CALFIRE grant, to collect cores and fungal samples of white pines throughout the full range of climate zones in Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. Soon she'll be poised to map defense and growth patterns and tradeoffs across this climate and geographic space. 
• Joint JD / Ecology MS student Hilary Sanders is moving ahead with the final field season of her shrub removal experiment to test the effects of shrubs on tree survival and growth and multiple sites in the 2021 Caldor Fire. Often shrubs are considered deadly to conifer seedlings after severe wildfire. Yet so far, we find that seedling growth and survival seem strong, though the shrubs grow even faster. The outcome remains to be seen! Stay tuned for Hilary's paper in 2025. 

Summer-Fall 2023

• Two of our graduate students received $100k grants from CAL FIRE to fund their research! Nina Venuti for her proposal, "Tracking multi-decadal patterns of conifer phenology to support wild seed collection for post-fire reforestation". And Jennifer Cribbs for her proposal, "The effects of multiple disturbances on tree resilience to climate change". Congratulations Nina and Jenny! 
• Paige Kouba's curriculum for introductory ecology (which she taught multiple times as lead instructor) has become a go-to resource for teaching intro ecology and evolution classes at UC Davis. Congrats Paige and thanks for your hard work improving our undergraduate teaching. 
• Job updates for lab alums: Joan Dudney is Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara; Emily Brodie is leading the prescribed fire monitoring and analysis program for CAL FIRE; Mike Koontz is a full-time Scientist at Vibrant Planet; Derek Young is back full time at UC Davis and going up for promotion to Associate Professional Researcher. UPDATE: Derek got the promotion with a rare 2-step advancement! 

What we're doing

We study how plant populations and communities respond to change, including sudden, major disturbance such as fire and drought, as well as more gradual changes in climate. We focus mainly on how forest trees respond to drought, fire, disease, bark beetles, and competition. We spend a lot of time investigating burned areas in California's wildfires, from older fires like Angora and Delta to the massive fires of 2020 and 2021. We work to both understand and predict what controls and limits tree regeneration, especially in areas affected by high severity fire. We co-develop many of our research questions with partners in land management agencies, local resource conservation districts, nurseries, and nonprofit organizations. We are committed to answering questions and developing tools that will be useful for practitioners who are working to accelerate and broaden both pre-fire restoration and the post-fire reforestation pipeline. We use and develop new methods, including using drone photography and machine learning, as well as dynamic vegetation models (FATES) that may allow us to extend some of our research methods and ask questions at larger scales.