Philip Higuera is a professor in the department of ecosystem and conservation sciences at the University of Montana, where he directs the PaleoEcology and Fire Ecology Lab, funded largely from the National Science Foundation and Joint Fire Science Program. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in fire and disturbance ecology, and he advises graduate students and post docs.
Wildfires and severe drought are killing trees at an alarming rate across the West, and forests are struggling to recover as the planet warms. However, new research shows there are ways to improve forests’ chances of recovery – by altering how wildfires burn. In a new study, we teamed up with over 50 other fire […]
It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend. In a new study, we found a 246% increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western U.S. between the […]
