People

Dr. Erin Hanan | she/her
Associate Professor of Fire Ecology

Erin studies interactions among plant, soil, and hydrologic processes in arid and semi-arid systems. Disturbances such as wildfire, insect outbreaks, and forest clearing, play an important role in these dynamics, and in many ecosystems, disturbance events are becoming more frequent and severe in response to climate change and growing human populations. She uses use process-based models, remote sensing, and empirical analysis to answer questions about how climate change will affect future fire regimes, how these shifts will alter biogeochemical and ecohydrologic processes, and how we can mitigate the effects of climate change through management.

Postdocs

Dr. William Burke | he/him
Postdoctoral Scholar

Dr. Burke’s research is broadly focused on understanding the ecohydrologic effects of fuel treatments. Specifically, his research uses ecohydrologic modeling to assess how fuel treatments can and will affect forests, water, and fire. His research looks to answer: if fuel treatments are going to be an increasingly common part of our forest management, how are those treatments altering our landscapes and affecting resources we care about? William is also interested in model development and creating tools and functionality to improve our processes-based modeling of fuel treatments and more.

Dr. Ayalkibet M. Seka
Postdoctoral Scholar

Dr. Seka earned his PhD in remote sensing of hydrology from the University of Chinese Academy of Science, with a major in cartography and GIS. He has extensive experience in basin water resource management. His areas of expertise include watershed modeling, climate change impacts, disaster monitoring and future prediction, sediment dynamics, remote sensing, river basin management, and ecohydrology. In his teaching and research, Dr. Seka aspires to relate scientific concepts to local indigenous knowledge. Dr. Seka’s research earned him an excellent graduate student award from the Chinese Academy of Science in 2023. His current research focuses on modeling changing fire regimes and their effects on Great Basin carbon dynamics and ecohydrological processes. He is also interested in applying machine learning and other statistical learning algorithm to hydrology and disaster management.

Graduate Students

Maxwell Kay Strain | they/them
Ph.D. Candidate

Kay is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ecology Evolution and Conservation Biology program. Their research interests lie at the intersection of invasion ecology, global change ecology, and conservation. Kay’s dissertation focuses on how aridity moderates the effects of fire and grass invasion on ecosystem function.

Ashley Cale | she/her
Ph.D. Candidate

Ashley’s area of study explores the relationships between forest management treatments, fire mitigation efforts, and long term carbon stability in mixed conifer forests. In her free time, she enjoys painting, hiking, and being a loving caretaker to her two dogs and an excessive number of houseplants.

Elena Cox | she/her
Ph.D. Student

Elena is a PhD student in the Natural Resources and Environmental Science program. She earned her BA from Pitzer College and studied soil bacterial assemblage before and after wildfire in Southern California, and spent several years working in wildfire management across the country. She is broadly interested in how severity, management, and climate change affect ecosystem response to fire. Elena’s research examines soil heating during wildfire and fire effects on soil health and microbial processes.

Lab Alumni

Dr. Jianning Ren | he/him
Postdoctoral Scholar 2020-2023

Ning completed his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Washington State University. His postdoctoral research focused on understanding how precipitation variability and nitrogen deposition influence nitrogen export in drylands. He is also interested how climate change, bark beetle outbreaks, and land use change influence water resource management at regional and global scales. Personally, he likes reading, hiking, running, sleeping, exploring new hobbies, and staring into space.

Mary Brady | she/her
M.S. Natural Resources and Environmental Science

Mary completed her M.S. at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. Her thesis focused on (1) how fire severity and seasonal moisture variability interact to affect postfire nitrogen cycling in the Sierra Nevada, and (2) how we can advance wildfire research beyond indirect metrics of fire severity using a novel model (Soil Heating in Fire; SheFire), which estimates heating with depth and predicts its effects on soil organism survival (seeds, root tissue, proteins, etc.).

Honorary lab members

Lola & Beaker

Research interests: Strategies for disturbing the slumber patterns of Homo sapiens