“Wildfire regime shifts in Patagonian-Andean forest ecosystems: feedbacks and consequences in the face of climate and land-use changes”

Thomas Veblen photo

Thomas T. Veblen is a College of Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction in the Geography Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has graduated 32 PhDs since joining CU in 1981.  

From 1975 to 1979 he was on the faculty of the Forestry School of Universidad Austral de Chile, and from 1979 to 1981 he was a Research Fellow at the Forest Research Institute in New Zealand. His research focuses on disturbance ecology in the context of climate change and human impacts on temperate forest ecosystems in North America and South America. Since 1975 he has conducted field-based research on the dynamics of Patagonian-Andean forests in Chile and Argentina and comparative studies of similar forests in New Zealand. 

In the U.S. Rocky Mountains his research uses tree-ring reconstructions to examine the long-term history of wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks in the context of changing climate. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1985, elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1991, and named a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2008. He has long been engaged in extensive public outreach efforts to promote science-based decision making in forest management policy and adaptation to climate change.

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