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Philip E. Higuera
Assistant Professor of Fire Ecology

CONTACT INFORMATION

Department of Forest Resources
University of Idaho
P.O. Box 441133
Moscow, ID 83844-1133

Office: 204B, CNR building 
Lab: 408 McClure Hall
Phone: 208.885.6024
E-mail:   phiguera[at]uidaho.edu


EDUCATION
Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle, 2006
M.S., University of Washington, Seattle, 2002 
B.A., Middlebury College, Vermont, 1998

RESEARCH STATEMENT

My research focuses broadly on the climatic and vegetational controls of fire occurrence and fire regimes over a range of time scales. I am specifically interested in the impacts that interannual- to millennial-scale changes in climate and vegetation have on fire regimes in forested and non-forested ecosystems. How has past climate change influenced fire regimes in subalpine or boreal forests, and how can we use these natural experiments to gain insights into potential interactions between climate, vegetation, and fire in the future? I have addressed such questions using spatially-explicit modeling and quantitative analyses, dendrochronology, and charcoal and pollen in sediment records in regions including the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, and across Alaska.

Current projects
focus on:

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS (see PUBLICATIONS page for downloadable PDFs)

Brubaker, L.B., P. E. Higuera, T.S. Rupp, M. Olson, P.M. Anderson, and F.S. Hu. 2009. Linking sediment charcoal records and ecological modeling to understand causes of past fire-regime change in Alaskan boreal forests. Ecology. 90: 1788-1801.
Higuera, P.E., L.B. Brubaker, P.M. Anderson, F.S. Hu, and T.A. Brown. 2009. Vegetation mediated the impacts of postglacial climate change on fire regimes in the south-central Brooks Range, Alaska. Ecological Monographs. 9: 201-219.                                            

            Press Release: here
           
Selected popular media coverage: Science Daily,
Ecological Monographs Cover Photo: Xindi Lake

Higuera, P.E.
, L.B. Brubaker, P.M. Anderson, T. A. Brown, A. T. Kennedy, and F.S. Hu. 2008. Frequent Fires in Ancient Shrub Tundra: Implications of Paleo-records for Arctic Environmental Change. PLoS ONE, 3:
e0001744.  (featured in Editors' Choice in Science 328: 586)

Selected popular media coverage: New Scientist, Science Daily, The Economic Times
Our World, Voice of America Radio, March 15thmp3 file 

Higuera, P.E., Peters, M.E., Brubaker, L.B., and D.G. Gavin. 2007. Understanding the origin and analysis of sediment charcoal records with a simulation model. Quaternary Science Reviews, 26: 1790-1809.

Peters, M.E., and P.E. Higuera. 2007. Quantifying the source area of macroscopic charcoal with a particle dispersal model. Quaternary Research, 67: 304-310.

Hu, F.S., L.B. Brubaker, D.G. Gavin, P.E. Higuera, J.A. Lynch, T.S. Rupp, and W. Tinner. 2006. How climate and vegetation influence the fire regime of the Alaskan Boreal Biome: the Holocene perspective. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 11:829-846.

Higuera, P.E., D.G. Sprugel, and L B. Brubaker. 2005. Reconstructing fire regimes with charcoal from small-hollow sediments: a calibration with tree-ring records of fire. The Holocene, 15:238-251.


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Last updated September, 2009