Philip Higuera

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PEH

Philip E. Higuera
National Parks Ecological Research Fellow
Whitlock Paleoecology Lab, Montana State University
Hu Quaternary Ecology Lab, University of Illinois

CONTACT INFORMATION
Department of Earth Sciences
200 Traphagen Hall
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717

Office: Leon Johnson Hall #709
Phone (lab): 406.994.6856
Phone (office/cell): 406.599.8908
Email: philip.higuera[at]montana.edu

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

RESEARCH INTEREST

My research focuses broadly on understanding the patterns and causes of late Quaternary vegetation change at landscape to regional spatial scales. I use paleoecological archives, such as lake sediments and tree-ring records, to reconstruct fire regimes and vegetation composition over thousands of years. I also use numerical modeling and statistical techniques to understand and quantify paleoecological records. My current projects focus on:

Interactions between climate, fire, and vegetation in boreal forests, subalpine forests, and arctic tundra
Understanding the origin of sediment charcoal records and developing analytical methods for reconstructing fire regimes with sediment charcoal data

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. Linking sediment charcoal records and ecological modeling to understand causes of past fire-regime change in Alaskan boreal forests. Ecology. In revision.

Higuera, P.E., L.B. Brubaker, P.M. Anderson, F.S. Hu, and T.A. Brown. Vegetation mediated the impacts of postglacial climate change on fire regimes in the southcentral Brooks Range, Alaska. Ecology. In press.

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.

Comment on and freely access a PDF of this paper here:
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001744
Selected popular media coverage: New Scientist, Science Daily, The Economic Times
Our World, Voice of America Radio, March 15th: mp3 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.

Last updated July, 2008