Daniel L Perret
I'm a biogeographer, forest ecologist, and dendrochronologist. I'm currently an ORISE Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.
Contact: daniel.perret@usda.gov
Research
The blurbs below give a brief overview of some current and past research projects.
In general terms, my work seeks to understand and predict the dramatic ways that human actions are altering the planet’s ecology, with the goal of improving conservation and management outcomes. My current research leverages large-scale forest inventory data, tree-ring records, non-native species’ distributions, and ecological niche theory to investigate the future of western North American forests in light of changing climatic and disturbance regimes.
Up-to-date lists of my publications can be found on Google Scholar and ResearchGate. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re having trouble accessing any articles!
Contents
- Climate and disturbance impacts on subalpine forests
- Large-scale forest mortality detection and attribution
- Space versus time in ecological forecasting
- Tree invasions as global change experiments
Climate and disturbance impacts on subalpine forests
Using data from the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis database, we’ve been investigating how climate change and changing forest disturbance regimes are impacting subalpine forest systems across the western US. Building off of the first range-wide assessment of subalpine fir status and trends, as well as work by Seidl & Turner (2022), we proposed a new framework for linking from individual tree responses to climate and disturbance through to ecosystem-level reorganization and resilience trajectories. The punchline is that fire disturbance has a far larger projected impact on subalpine forest resilience than climate change alone – which presents interesting management opportunities in high-impact landscapes.
Publications
Large-scale forest mortality detection and attribution
In 2022, US Forest Service Aerial Detection Survey (ADS) flights found massive amounts of fir mortality across more than a million acres in southern Oregon. This “Firmageddon” event has gained attention in the popular media, and highlighted the need for accurate methods for detecting past and ongoing mortality events, as well as a better understanding of landscape-scale vulnerability to future events. To this end, we are working with colleagues in Forest Health and Protection and forest managers to co-produce workflows that integrate multiple sources of information on forest mortality – plot-based measurements, aerial surveys, and satellite imagery. The resulting data products will support further monitoring, forest management, and additional research.
Space versus time in ecological forecasting
As part of my doctoral research, I collected a new network of tree-ring data that span the climatic niche of ponderosa pine. Together with Prof. Margaret Evans at the University of Arizona and Prof. Dov Sax at Brown University, we used these data to demonstrate that the growth response of ponderosa pine to spatial climatic variation is not predictive of the species’ response to climate change. In fact, the space-for-time substitution that is so common in ecological forecasting generates predictions that are directionally opposed to observed responses to recent warming. These spatial-temporal mismatches may be quite common across species, systems, and biomes, and I would love to continue exploring this in the future.
Prof. Amy Angert (UBC) wrote a great commentary piece about this work that you can read here.
Publications
Media coverage
Tree invasions as global change experiments
When species become naturalized beyond their native range, we can gain all sorts of insight into what kinds of climatic, physical, and biotic conditions they can thrive under. Using these natural global change “experiments”, we can estimate the size of species’ fundamental climate niches and make predictions about which species are at risk and where. We’ve done this across all Pinus species globally, finding that most pine species that have become naturalized beyond their native range have been able to do so in climates beyond what they experience in their native range. Counterintuitively, the species with the most climatic wiggle room are those with the smallest, most-restricted native ranges – species like Monterey pine (P. radiata). We’ve used similar methods to also show that that many island endemic conifer species are at elevated risk from climate change despite that extra climatic wiggle room.
Publications
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