Fire Severity
I am seeking applications for a graduate student at the MS level to join an
ongoing project examining patterns of fire severity and their relations to
climate variability ("Disappearing refugia: identifying trends and resilience
in unburned islands under climate change"). This opening is at Utah State
University, where I will be joining the faculty in autumn of 2013. Crystal
Kolden (University of Idaho) is a collaborator on this project.
Qualifications
When enquiring, please include sufficient information to begin a dialog (at a
minimum, your CV, an unofficial transcript, and GRE scores). Please also read
some of my publications and those of my collaborators on related topics. The
minimum GRE scores required for admission to Utah State University are the 40th
percentile. But because our work in fire ecology, landscape ecology, and
community ecology is computationally and quantitatively intense, I prefer
students with good quantitative backgrounds (science, math, or engineering),
and quantitative GRE scores above the 85th percentile (although that is
certainly not a requirement). Our work environment includes R for statistics,
MySQL for database work, ESRI for GIS and remote sensing, ENVI for spectral
remote sensing, FUSION for LiDAR remote sensing, and Trimble and Leica for
surveying. Any experience with those tools is great but not required.
Paradoxically, field experience is not a requisite for application, but you
will !
probably be doing a lot of it (I provide considerable in-the-field training
for my students). My objective is to work as a partner with students to produce
significant work, publishable in high quality journals.
>From autumn semester:
James A Lutz
Assistant Professor, Forest Ecology
Utah State University
Current email: [email protected]
