Early snowmelt around the base of trees (“thaw circles”) extends the growing season but does not improve the performance of the understory spring ephemeral, Dutchman’s breeches.

While most forests have recovered after the 1988 Yellowstone Fires, some areas remain treeless 30+ years later. We found that this slow recovery reshapes previously forested ecosystems, with nearly half of the areas we visited “locked in” as sparse or non-forest for the foreseeable future.

I have joined the Editorial Board at Canadian Science Publishing’s journal, Botany,as an Early Career Researcher Associate Editor. Meet the full team here.

In this Story Map, Kristin Braziunas and I blend audio, video, and photography to tell a compelling story of our research on the effects of more frequent fire in Greater Yellowstone's forests. Check it out here!

Extensive data duplication, missing citations, and unverifiable methods leave more than three-quarters of specific leaf area data for four plant groups in the TRY Plant Trait Database unusable. Read more in the recent issue of Global Change Biology.

We measured rates and modes of snag-fall following the 1988 Yellowstone fires to identify drivers of landscape-level variability in snag persistence. Read more about what we found in our recent publication in Forest Ecology and Management.

Find out more about the effects of anomalously short-interval fires on understory plant communities in my recent publication in New Phytologist.

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a field ecologist? Read or listen to my reflective essay on my recent field season in Yellowstone published by Edge Effects, a digital magazine for the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Using Landsat imagery, we identified >40,000 hectares of previously forested land has not recovered to forest 30 years after the 1988 fires. Read more in our publication in Forest Ecology and Management.

I gave a public talk about my research on Yellowstone’s understory plant communities with the Wyoming Native Plant Society. Watch the recording here!

I joined ‘The Voyageur Way’ podcast to chat about all things hiking. Listen here!

I presented a ‘Naturalist Journeys’ talk with the North Branch Nature Center on the community ecology of northeast temperate forests. Watch here!

We found seed dispersal by ants to not be limiting in post-agricultural forests in central New York. Read the full publication in the Northeastern Naturalist.

A chapbook of poems I wrote while thru-hiking the Finger Lakes Trail in central New York is now available for purchase. All proceeds go to the Finger Lakes Trail Conference.