Research

News & Updates

20 March 2025

Feeling very grateful to have had the opportunity to help out in the field on this project led by Michelle Kissling and Molly McDevitt. Working in Kakagrak National Monument out in NW Alaska was an unbelievable experience full of learning and beauty. Here’s just a taste:

11 March 2025

Long-overdue update! Several exciting things to report. First, our paper published last year in PNAS was selected as a Finalist for the 2024 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences. Really pleased to have had this awesome collaboration with Margaret Evans (UArizona) and Dov Sax (Brown U) recognized in this way!

Second, a paper coauthored with Dave Bell and Harold Zald from the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station came out in Global Change Biology early last month. In this study, titled “Reducing fire severity and extent bolsters subalpine forest resilience to global change through key demographic pathways”, we present a framework for bridging from the demographic responses of individual trees and populations to ecosystem-level reorganization trajectories. We build on the excellent framework proposed by Seidl & Turner (2022) to demonstrate that fire disturbance is projected to have a much larger impact on the probability of subalpine forest resilience than climate change alone. Check it out here. There’s also a great commentary about the paper written by Xiangyi Li and Hui Yang, available here. I particularly like their graphical abstract (from Li & Yang 2025):

16 January 2024

Prof. Amy Angert at the University of British Columbia wrote an awesome commentary piece about our ponderosa paper that just came out here, titled “The space-for-time gambit fails a robust test”. She does a really great job contextualizing our findings and discussing some of the eco-evolutionary mechanisms that may underlie them. I’m a huge fan of her work in general, and thrilled that she found this work compelling.

December 2023

It’s finally out! Beyond excited that my final dissertation chapter is over the finish line and out in the world. Check it out here in PNAS. It’s wild to think that the data in this paper were collected almost five and a half years ago. Hopefully this paper helps moves the climate change biogeography field away from simple space-for-time substitution, and toward a more nuanced, temporally-informed approach… still lots of work to do to get there!

The picture below is from one of my favorite field sites from that study, an isolated pocket of ponderosa pine up West Rosebud Creek in the Beartooths in SW Montana:

August 2023

Had a wonderful time in Portland at the 2023 ESA meeting – you can find materials from the “Intro to FIA for Ecologists” workshop here. Awesome working with great friends and colleagues putting this together – Bailey McLaughlin, Jane Terzibashian, and Harold Zald.

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Daniel L Perret