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Projecting Forest Landscape Dynamics

Lead Scientist(s): Dr. Winslow D. Hansen

While mechanistic understanding of the processes that underpin forest change are important, human wellbeing primarily depends on services provisioned in landscapes. Thus, understanding where and why future landscape changes will occur are among the biggest challenges facing ecologists today.

One of our goals in the Forest Futures Lab is to advance theory on how cross-scale interactions shape forest-landscape trajectories. We combine remote sensing, experiments, and process-based modeling to characterize how and why forest landscapes have changed in the past, project how forest landscapes may change in the future, and evaluate potential approaches for people to steward forest landscapes toward more sustainable trajectories.