I lead the Cloquet Forestry Center and Hubachek Wilderness Research Center teams as the Director of Operations and Forest Stewardship for the UMN Experimental Forests properties. In this role, I seek to ensure that the facilities and land can be places of applied education, research, and stewardship related to northern forest ecosystems.In coordination with the ROC System Operations Manager, this position is responsible for initiating and implementing all strategic and operational plans to support and enhance the college’s mission through managing all aspects of teaching, research, land stewardship, timber production, and outreach activities at the CFC and HWRC. The Director of Operations is responsible for the centers’ annual budgets including management of the center’s resources, income allocation and grants management, as well as management of the center’s personnel.In coordination with the ROC System Operations Manager, this position is responsible for initiating and implementing all strategic and operational plans to support and enhance the college’s mission through managing all aspects of teaching, research, land stewardship, timber production, and outreach activities at the CFC and HWRC. The Director of Operations is responsible for the centers’ annual budgets including management of the center’s resources, income allocation and grants management, as well as management of the center’s personnel.My primary leadership and land stewardship philosophies include acknowledging indigenous sovereignty, respecting the agency of individuals and the Land by approaching all with humility, trusting that change is an enduring constant, the Landscape Triad for balancing multiple objectives, and promoting the capacities for antifragility and resilience and adaptability to expected and unexpected changes.

I oversee forest management and research activities on the 4,500 acres that are a part of the Cloquet Forestry Center's primary (3,400 ac) and auxiliary (1,100 ac) properties. CFC forests are actively managed for the primary objective of providing space for applied research, education, and outreach related to northern forests. To achieve this larger objective, I apply both conventional and experimental silvicultural techniques that consider the complex temporal, structural, and spatial dynamics of forest communities.

FNRM 3611 - Field Silviculture (2 credits)Responsible for course development, instruction and grading of undergraduate students on silviculture and applied forest ecology concepts, quantitative methods, and field sampling techniques. Topics included even and uneven-aged silvicultural systems and timing, passive and active site preparation techniques, Forest Stewardship Plan preparation, Minnesota native plant community (NPC) designation, and site quality.

I lead field and laboratory silviculture and applied forest ecology research that is asking questions about how to manage forests for a variety of objectives, such as sustainability, biodiversity, climate change and invasive species preparedness, and timber and biomass harvesting. I answer questions by using data-driven statistical approaches in both SAS and R. I engage with both retrospective, observational studies and active, experimental manipulations in a variety of forest types and field settings (boreal and temperate forests) throughout the upper great lakes region. My collaborators include researchers and practitioners from the University of Minnesota, U.S. Forest Service, Minnesota Forest Resources Council, Minnesota DNR, and the Wisconsin DNR. My primary areas of interest and expertise are dendroecology, forest development, silviculture, and stand dynamics.

I attended graduate school in the University of Minnesota's Department of Forest Resources with Anthony D'Amato and Shawn Fraver as my advisers and Kurt Kipfmuller as a committee member. I designed and implemented an observational and retrospective field and laboratory study of jack pine dominated forest structure, development, and climate sensitivity using dendrochronological techniques. Results indicated that these forests are complex, early-successional systems that follow a variety of developmental pathways. Data were primarily managed in Microsoft Excel and SAS and data analyses were primarily done in SAS and R. A full record of the study context, methods, results, and discussion of application can be found in my thesis (see link).

I worked for the Silviculture and Applied Forest Ecology lab. I managed or co-managed field sampling, sample processing, and data analysis of tree-rings and other vegetation data in both field and laboratory environments. I located and established research plots and supervised collection and processing of samples and data. The primary projects in which I was involved assessed the historic stand dynamics of old-growth black ash forests, the efficacy of short rotation woody biomass crops on sequestering greenhouse gases, and the structure and dynamics of a variety of forest types across the Superior National Forest.