Lecture at Sheridan College to Focus on Climate Change and Forest Resilience

Climate change and forest resilience will be the focus of a lecture at Sheridan College Wednesday, November 9 at 7 pm in the Mars Ag Center, room 201. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Research Scientist Jed Meunier will give a lecture titled “Fire, Climate Change and Forest Resilience in Sub-boreal Forests.” The lecture is part of Sheridan College’s 2022 Museum of Discovery Science Lecture series. The event is free and open to the public. The talk will highlight new research that illuminates the fire ecology in northern sub-boreal forests and make general comparisons to the mountainous west, boreal and other forests regarding global climate regulation.

Meunier will discuss how in large parts of the world, disturbance is a primary driver of ecosystem structure and function, which influences climate change. According to Meunier, forest types in the western U.S. and their associated fire regimes are predictable based on elevational gradients of temperature and precipitation. Thus, in these systems, the contributions of forests as a catalyst for further climate change impacts are better understood. Meunier is an ecologist and research scientist within the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry. His research interests range from individual species attributes to landscape ecology with a unifying theme of understanding how forces of climate and disturbance drive ecological change and how society, in turn, manages for resilient systems.