Background

I study fire as a local catalyst of global climate change.

I am currently a Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Scholar with the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (NW-CASC). The NW-CASC is partnership between northwestern universities and the USGS and is based at the University of Washington’s Earthlab. I’m located in Dr. Solomon Dobrowski’s Forest Landscape Ecology Lab at the University of Montana in Missoula. Download my CV as a PDF.

Research interests

I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I worked in the Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology Lab under the supervision of Dr. Monica Turner. My dissertation investigated interactions between short-interval fires and topographic position on postfire regeneration, consequences of forest change for wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone, and shifts in tree composition after recent fires in Glacier National Park. Read more about these projects on the Research page.

Natural and human systems across the globe are changing at unprecedented rates. My research seeks to understand how fire -a key driver of material and energy cycling, species composition, and ecosystem function across much of North America’s forests- will shape the future of forest ecosystems and impact their role in broader coupled social-ecological systems. My work is focused on forests in western North America (Alaska’s boreal forest and the US Northern Rockies), covering stand to landscape spatial scales and paleoecological to contemporary time scales.

Landscape ecology focuses on how the spatial relationships of processes constrain their behavior, but is also explicitly concerned with the ways that human and non-human processes interact. My work seeks to use the mechanistic insights gained from ecological research to inform forest management. I ask basic ecological questions: How do forests respond to rare or novel disturbances? What are the biophysical constraints on tree regeneration? But these have significant implications for our relationship with ecosystems: What services do we gain or lose when forests become grasslands? How does reorganization of forests impact animal biodiversity? My work has a home in landscape ecology because it sits at the intersection of complex ecological and social questions.

For my MS in Dr. Philip Higuera’s PaleoEcology and Fire Ecology Lab at the University of Montana, I reconstructed the last 450+ years of fire activity in an Alaskan interior boreal forest landscape to explore interactions among fire, climate and tree establishment. I also synthesized a body of paleofire records from across the Alaskan boreal forest to characterize biome-scale patterns and drivers of fire activity during the Holocene.

Personal interests

My passion for exploring the natural world is what led me to science, and I enjoy a variety of methods for doing so: by foot, bike, ski, and on rock. I am powered by good food, fresh coffee and hoppy beer.

Before beginning graduate school, I spent six months living aboard a small sailboat in the south Pacific. You can download “Ocean Wilderness”, a collection of photographs and essays I produced on the experience

Contact

Franke College of Forestry and Conservation

University of Montana

32 Campus Drive

Missoula, MT 59812

Email: hoecker [at] wisc [dot] edu

Twitter: @tylerhoecker