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

人类对环境的影响改变了自然植被，改变了自然火灾制度，使研究人员和土地管理人员对自然火灾及其对植被和环境变化的反应缺乏全面的了解。这项博士论文研究项目将研究全新世环境变化对植被和火的长期相互作用。该项目将更好地了解美国东南沿海平原过去火灾活动、植被和环境之间的相互作用。该研究项目将为生态系统对未来环境变化的反应建模提供新的见解，并将确定可能影响史前社会的过去环境变化。该项目将告知土地管理人员，他们正在保护和恢复以依赖火的长叶松为主的濒危植物群落，长叶松是一种经济和环境重要的树种。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将为有前途的学生建立强大的独立研究生涯提供支持。由于长叶松林生态系统的商业和环境价值，恢复、保护和管理长叶松林生态系统最近变得越来越重要。保护和管理这些危险的生态系统需要了解植被和火的长期历史及其与环境变化的相互关系。博士生将研究历史上的自然火灾活动及其对过去植被组成变化的反应。他将分析花粉和沉积物中稳定的碳同位素比率，以寻找植被组成时间变化的证据，并将分析稳定的碳同位素，以确定过去的干旱时段。这些生物物理性质的量化将记录火灾活动和燃料来源的变化。这些对全新世期间植被、火灾活动和环境变化的分析将为类似于当前环境变化情景下预测的条件提供新的见解。

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.