Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The boreal forest forms a wide circum-polar swath covering extensive regions of Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. This biome provides natural functioning to regulate numerous atmospheric and hydrologic processes while providing habitat for many species of flora and fauna. Susceptible to extensive natural disturbances (e.g. fire, insects, wind), these northern forests are effectively described as forming a heterogeneous dynamic landscape mosaic. Additionally, the vast boreal forest represents a renewable natural resource that results in extensive harvesting operations for extracting timber and wood fiber; thus further altering the mosaic through anthropogenic influences. Current forest management policies stress the requirement of emulating natural disturbances while planning forest-harvesting operations. Such legislated policies assume that the boreal environment is somehow able to better recover from, or unaffectedly develop following natural disturbances. Thus, any anthropogenic alterations of the landscape should mimic these acceptable natural disturbances. The problem remains that science currently cannot unequivocally explain the ecological differences among disturbance regimes nor can they scientifically claim that natural disturbances are better for the environment than are disturbances with anthropogenic origins. This research has the goal to discover linkages among specific spatial patterns and ecological processes and to elucidate any differences among forest disturbance types. If a spatial pattern can be contextualized as a realization of a spatial process at an instant in time, then that pattern should contain some insight to the process(es) that developed it. It is the analysis and comparison of spatial patterns created by forest disturbances and the re-vegetation process that I wish to explore within a multidimensional spatial and temporal framework. Research will integrate data from fieldwork, satellite imaging, and spatial statistical analysis.