Harold S.J. Zald I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forestry and Wildland Resources at Humboldt State University. I received my BS and MS in Resource Ecology and Management from the University of Michigan and my PhD in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University. My teaching focuses on field-based, experiential, and structured inquiry approaches to forest measurements, inventory, and monitoring. My research focuses on:
Integrating field and remotely sensed data to generate spatial predictions of forest composition, structure, and change.
Ecology and management of Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forests with emphasis on responses to climate change, alterations of natural disturbance regimes, and ecosystem restoration.
Tree Invasion of mountain meadows in response to climate change.
Responses of large old trees to long-term climate change and short-term drought events.
The role of complex terrain and diverse ecosystem configurations in mediating resilience of forests to disturbance agents and climate stressors.
Chance C. Callahan I’m a Californian that enjoys exploring our natural world and attempting to understand the ecological functions that take place within it. When I am not working in the Forest Measurements & Ecology Lab I try to spend as much time as possible running around our local mountains and forests. I graduated from Humboldt State University in spring 2017 with a B.S. degree in Forestry (Hydrology). During that time, I gained experience in the field by working with the U.S. Forest Service as a field technician during the summers and realized I wanted to know more about forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains. My research is focused on Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forests responses to forest thinning and burning treatments. Particularly, using tree-rings to understand how forest management strategies affect trees resistance to drought stress
Current Undergraduate Students
James Lamping James is a fourth year undergraduate student at Humboldt State University, majoring in forestry with an emphasis in forest soils and a minor in geospatial analysis. James is broadly interested in remote sensing applications in forestry. This past field season, James worked at Teakettle Experimental Forest, assisting in tree coring, regeneration surveys, canopy photos, stem mapping, and very high resolution imagery collected using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) platforms. His goals are to finish his B.S. degree at HSU and continue on to graduate school.
Past Lab Members
Ariel (Ari) Cowan, Research Assistant I received my MS in Forest Ecosystems & Society from Oregon State University. As a student of the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station's Forest Mycology lab, I studied fire impacts on soil burning and the mycorrhizal fungi of ponderosa pine. Originally from Brooklyn NY, my experience in forestry began while earning my BS at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science & Forestry. I've enjoyed working in a wide variety of landscapes including northern hardwood forests, California oak woodlands, coastal scrub, redwoods, Russian taiga, sagebrush steppe, juniper woodlands, and the dry ponderosa forests of Central Oregon. looking forward to finding a way to combine the worlds of disturbance ecology, dendrochronology, and mycology in my career. Ari is currently a Natural Resource Specialist with the Oregon Department of Forestry
Hannah L. Morrison I am from Seattle, where I attended the University of Washington for my undergraduate degree. After receiving my B.S. in Forest Resources in 2012, I relocated to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where I worked in the forest industry for 3+ years. Hannah's research used carbon stable isotopes and dendrochronology to understand how forest restoration treatments (thinning and prescribed burning) influenced moisture stress during extreme drought in a mixed-conifer forest in the southern Sierra Nevada, California.