Philip Higuera is a professor of fire ecology in the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences at the University of Montana. He directs the PaleoEcology and Fire Ecology Lab, funded largely from the National Science Foundation and Joint Fire Science Program, and he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in fire and disturbance ecology. Research in his lab spans western North America and broadly addresses interactions among climate, wildfire, ecosystems, and people, across timescales of years to millennia. This work has revealed how fire activity varies with climate change in recent decades and the distant past, and how forest ecosystems respond to past and ongoing changes. Since 2016, collaborative efforts have increasingly focused on understanding wildfire as an integrated social-ecological phenomenon, helping address current societal challenges centered around living with wildfire.

Research in the PaleoEcology and Fire Ecology Lab focuses on understanding the interactions among climate, wildfire, ecosystems, and people over a range of spatial and temporal scales, in the past, present, and future. Understanding ecological change over time integrates projects within the lab, revealing patterns and processes unobservable over human life spans, providing context for ongoing environmental change, and helping anticipate the consequences of future environmental change.

Current themes:

• Social-ecological resilience to wildfire
• Climate-vegetation-fire interactions across a range of temporal scales in Rocky Mountain subalpine forests, and Alaskan boreal forests and tundra ecosystems 
• Post-fire tree regeneration in Rocky Mountain forests and the western US
• Informing terrestrial ecosystem models with paleoecological daa

Tools:

• The lab uses lake sediments, tree rings, observational records, and statistical modeling to study ecosystems from time scales spanning the past several decades to the past 15,000 years.

Locations:

• Western North America, focusing in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska. 

FORS 230 - Fire Management and Environmental Change 

FORS 333 - Fire Ecology

FORS 540 - Fire and Disturbance Ecology 

FORS 595 - Special Topics: Living with Wildfire

NRSM 265 - Elements of Ecological Restoration