Mike is a research affiliate with Earth Lab and CIRES at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Davis and his MSc from Colorado State University. He's interested in how spatial patterns of vegetation structure and composition affect the resilience of forests to wildfire and bark beetle disturbance. The goal of his research is to reveal how system-wide feedbacks in disturbance-prone forests can be harnessed to guide effective management action.
Mike is currently a plant ecologist and geospatial data scientist at Vibrant Planet. He leads the development of a system for monitoring critical forest resources, and forecasting them into uncertain climate change futures.
The core activity of this project is to use such a finer-time-scale analysis to identify the fuels, weather, and/or firefighting resources conditions associated with rapid fire growth.
This project will advance fundamental understanding of how aboveground biomass recovery trajectories vary as a function of fire size and severity, drought, and conifer forest type (1984-present) across the western U.S.
Damage from natural hazards is increasing despite the growing ability of the geo-sciences to delineate where and when extreme events will occur. We show that decades of risky development has increased exposure to the most damaging natural hazards.
Earth Lab takes a collaborative, big-data approach to answering some of our most pressing questions related to fire. We seek to understand what controls fire in the landscape, how fire is changing, and what this means for society.
Drones are revolutionizing the way natural scientists measure their study systems. We are researching how measurements from small remote sensing drones, aka uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), can complement existing data to answer environmental questions in new ways.
Koontz