Calendar

Lecture begins at 7pm
Questions and Networking hosted by Friends of the Pine Bush Community 8pm-8:30pm

IN PERSON: If you would like to attend in person, please reserve your tickets below.

VIRTUAL: If you would like to watch it online, please click here to get a link.

Fire has sustained fire-adapted forests for millennia – the very same tree communities predicted to remain most resilient to future climates. The aboveground contributors to positive feedback driving the persistence of these communities remains well-documented – fire effects on microclimate and fuel dynamics both act to promote fire-adapted trees. How fire may affect belowground properties to promote fire-adapted trees, however, remains poorly understood. These results suggest that fire increases the availability of cations like calcium and manganese and lowers the availability of nitrogen along with heavy metals like copper and aluminum to promote the success of a known pyrophytic seedling – pitch pine. This offers novel insight into our understanding of how fire allows for the recovery and persistence of fire-adapted ecosystems, and offers new management opportunities to fine-tune fire to optimize belowground effects.

Bio - Eva Legge is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University in the Department of Biology and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research aims to bridge the gap between basic research on beneficial fungal-tree relationships and applied forest management. An avid science writer, she is the student coordinator for the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation’s Young Voices of Science program, where she mentors other students on science communication, outreach, advocacy and policy. She takes every opportunity she can to share her research findings with landowners, forest managers and policymakers in order to help us manage our forests to be more resilient to global change. Legge received her B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College in 2023.

Suitable for tweens, teens and adults.

This lecture is being offered in a hybrid format.

IN PERSON: If you would like to attend in person, please reserve your tickets below.

VIRTUAL: If you would like to watch it online, please click here to get a link.