This webinar is part of a series featuring NOAA Climate and Global Change (C&GC) Fellows in the NOAA Science Seminar Series. C&GC is supported by NOAA’s Climate Program Office and managed by The Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) within the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Katherine Siegel is an interdisciplinary scientist who researches global change ecology, conservation science, and econometrics to identify and quantify drivers of change in social-ecological systems. Her research seeks to inform just and sustainable management of working landscapes for biodiversity and people in the context of rapid environmental change.
Working landscapes in the western United States – such as forests and rangelands –support biodiversity and human livelihoods but face escalating pressures from climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. While these systems are adapted to wildfire, climate change and land management legacies are interacting to increase the frequency and size of high-severity wildfires, with consequences for humans lives and well-being, as well as ecosystem composition, functioning, and the services provided to humans. This talk will integrate global change ecology, geospatial data science, econometrics, and conservation science to identify and quantify causal relationships between land management, climate change, and wildfire in forests and rangelands in the western US. It will address questions about the relationships between land management and wildfire activity, and the effects of changing wildfire regimes on forest ecosystems. This work seeks to advance climate-adaptive forest and rangeland management at the landscape scale.
