"Mobile laboratory for the geography of disturbance: Ecosystem disturbances, interactions, and landscape resilience"

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Ecological disturbances play a significant role in community and ecosystem ecology by re-setting the stage on which plant and animal communities assemble. The objective of this research program is to study the near-term trajectory of northern lodgepole pine forest community structure in British Columbia (BC) when it is exposed to multiple ecological disturbances in succession, a situation known in the ecological literature as compounded disturbance. Ecological resilience theory suggests that compounded disturbances have the potential to nudge ecosystems into different states with altered biodiversity, especially in the context of additional stressors such as climate change. Mechanisms contributing to this change are associated with inter-species variation in growth and reproduction. Vegetation fires and insect outbreaks are natural disturbances that have contributed to forest structure and function across Canada in the near and distant past, but in BC the recent mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic is an unprecedented disturbance event that has left a vast area of pine forest prone to compounded disturbance by subsequent fire, forest harvesting, or both.