The vacancy announcement for the PIRE Postdoctoral Research Associate position is currently posted on the MSU web site at: http://www.montana.edu/jobs/research/11192-33
A 2-yr position, with possible extension, is available for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join an interdisciplinary long-term research project on wildfire funded by NSF's Partnership in International Research and Education (PIRE) program. Fire is an important natural disturbance in temperate forested ecosystems and serves as a critical but poorly understood link between climate change and biosphere response. In recent decades, extreme drought, land-cover alteration, and non-native plant invasions in temperate regions around the world have altered natural fire regimes at an alarming rate, and in the process, threatened native biodiversity and human well-being. Identifying the climate and human-related drivers of disturbance-regime change is one of the most challenging issues facing natural resource management. WildFIRE PIRE utilizes the similarities and contrasts in fire, climate, and land-use interactions in three settings as a platform for integrated fire-science research and education: Tasmania, New Zealand, and the U.S. Rocky Mountains. It employs state-of-the-art field, laboratory, and modeling tools to advance our understanding of regional and hemispheric fire-climate linkages and land-use feedbacks in different biogeographical settings. Modeling experiments in WildFIRE PIRE will be driven by insights from the paleo- and historical information, as well as future climate projections. Modeling serves as a tool to identify the drivers of major thresholds in landscape dynamics, including the consequences of temporal and spatial changes in vegetation (e.g. composition, distribution, successional stage), climate (e.g., fuel moisture, fire weather), fire (e.g. frequency, extent, ignition distribution), and fuel (e.g. fuel loadings, fuel classes). Different grid-based models and modeling approaches are available for the western U.S., Tasmania, and New Zealand that relate to WildFIRE PIRE. Dynamic ecosystem process models (Fire-BGCv2, Firescape and other GCTE models) have been used to simulate landscape dynamics in several vegetation types in the northwestern U.S. and southwestern Tasmania, including areas where WildFIRE PIRE studies are underway (Cary et al., 2006; Keane et al., 2010; King et al., 2008a,b, 2006). In New Zealand, landscape fire-succession models have been developed to integrate modules and functions that explicitly represent human activity (Perry et al., in review). In this approach, plant-functional types (including flammability traits) are used to represent spatial and temporal competition for resources (water and light) in a rule-based modeling framework, and wildfire behavior is represented using a cellular-automata model of fire spread.
