Doctoral Dissertation Research: Fire, Vegetation and Environmental Interactions Across the Holocene on the U.S. Southeastern Coastal Plain

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Human influences on the environment have transformed natural vegetation and altered natural fire regimes, leaving researchers and land managers with an incomplete understanding of natural fires and their response to changes in vegetation and environment. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate long-term vegetation and fire interactions in response to Holocene environmental variability. This project will provide a better understanding of past interactions among fire activity, vegetation, and environment on the U.S. southeastern coastal plain. The research project will provide new insights regarding the modeling of ecosystem responses to future environmental change, and it will identify past environmental changes that may have affected prehistoric societies. The project will inform land managers who are conserving and restoring imperiled plant communities dominated by fire-dependent longleaf pine, an economically and environmentally important tree species. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.The restoration, conservation, and management of longleaf pine forest ecosystems has gained recent importance because of their commercial and environmental value. The conservation and management of these imperilled ecosystems requires an understanding of the long-term histories of vegetation and fire as well as their interrelationships with environmental change. The doctoral student will investigate historical natural fire activity and its response to past changes in the composition of vegetation. He will analyze pollen and stable carbon isotope ratios in sediments for evidence of temporal changes in vegetation composition, and he will analyse stable carbon isotopes to identify past drought intervals. The quantification of these biophysical properties will document changes in fire activity and fuel sources. These analyses of changes in vegetation, fire activity, and the environment during the Holocene will provide new insights into conditions analogous to those predicted under current environmental change scenarios.