Research

The "Succession Modeling Project" at the Mount St. Helens Institute is my first post-graduate research project. I'm developing a LANDIS-II forest succession model to investigate landscape-scale recovery after disturbance. I'm supported in this task by a team including my principle investigator, Donald Brown, PhD, Research Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service based out of the Pacific Northwest Research Station; Deahn Donnerwright, PhD, Landscape Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service based out of the Northern Research Station; and Dylan Fischer, PhD, Ecosystem Ecologist and Professor at The Evergreen State College.

In this role, I work remotely, manage my own time, and maintain my own computer and software licenses. I facilitate bi-weekly hour-long meetings with my team to update them on my progress or ask them for guidance when needed. I participated in the 2025 PULSE, a conference for research on the Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument, where I met some legends in my field like Jerry Franklin, Virginia Dale, and Mark Swanson. This summer, I'll also attend the first salmon release in waters above the Sediment Retention Structure since it was built. I feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity and I feel desperate for ways to stay involved at Mount St. Helens when this project has concluded.

The "Sapflow Project" was my pride and joy in graduate school. After my undergraduate studies were over, I continued working with Dylan Fischer, coordinating research for his lab, including this collaboration with Anand "Ani" Jayakaran, PhD, Professor at Washington State University and a low-impact development engineer. Ani was interested in scaling up whole-tree transpiration to generate city-scale estimates of the volume of rainfall mitigated by trees. To do this, I spent every day for two years in the research forest at The Evergreen State College, using telemetry sensors to measure thermal dissipation, canopy interception and throughfall for a rigorously-derived forest hydrologic dataset.

This project put my skills to the test and gave me a taste of what it might be like if I pursued a terminal degree in this field. I was given autonomy to ask my own research questions and develop my own study design. I also wrote the final report, submitted to the Washington State Department of Ecology, which was a different kind of writing than I was used to. I owe everything to this project and to Dylan Fischer for the opportunity and support.

The "Ellsworth Project" was the capstone project for my undergraduate studies. I received grants from the Northwest Scientific Association (NWSA) and the Louis Stokes All Nations Alliance for Minority Participation (ANAMP) for undergraduate research and travel funds. The project was proposed by Michael Case, PhD, Senior Forest Ecologist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and overseen by Dylan Fischer, PhD, Ecosystem Ecologist and Professor at The Evergreen State College. 

The work was conducted at the Ellsworth Creek Preserve in the Willapa Bay region of Southwest Washington. Managed by TNC, the preserve is where they demonstrate sustainable commercial forest practices that achieve multiple goals like increased carbon sequestration, accelerated structural development, and improved ecosystem health. My project compared pre-treatment conditions to contemporary observations using the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS). I used FVS to model TNC's forest inventory data and treatment parameters to estimate the aboveground and belowground C pools in 2009 and made comparisons by plotting the outputs next to samples I collected in 2022.