Heather J. Lynch

heather.j.lynch AT post.harvard.edu
Harvard University Herbaria
22 Divinity Ave. #317
Cambridge, MA 02138

The basics:

My CV
My course web page for BS55: Ecology (Spring 2005)

Research Interests:

My graduate research broadly examines some of the large scale spatiotemporal patterns of forest ecosystems.  Right now, I'm working on three aspects of this question:

1.  Spatiotemporal dynamics of insect-fire interactions, i.e. do insect outbreaks promote forest fires and do forest fires promote insect outbreaks?

There are two study sites I have been focused on, British Columbia and Yellowstone National Park.

British Columbia:

One of the major forest pests in British Columbia is the western spruce budworm (C. occidentalis).  I have been using spatial statistics to try and uncover any spatiotemporal clustering of fire events and insect damage using data drawn from the British Columbia Natural Disturbance Database.

Yellowstone National Park:

There are four major insect pests in Yellowstone National Park (western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir beetle, mountain pine beetle, pine engraver).  One of my most recent projects was to answer the question:  Did the previous 20 year history of mountain pine beetle damage have a statistically significant effect on the course of the 1988 Yellowstone Fires?  This project was the recipient of the Howard T. Fisher Prize in GIS for 2005.

2.  Remote sensing of insect damage

One of the major bottlenecks for understanding the large-scale patterns of insect damage is a lack of spatially explicit damage data.  It is particularly difficult to find datasets which cover large areas or multiple time periods.  Satellite imagery has the potential to cheaply and efficiently map large areas anywhere in the world, and to do so repreatedly and consistently.  I am particularly interrested in using the LANDSAT satellite, which takes an image of Yellowstone National Park every 16 days with 30 m resolution.   However, the LANDSAT satellite may not have the resolution to detect the relatively small outbreaks in Yellowstone National Park, and I have been working with an airborne hyperspectral sensor, known as Hymap, as well as a Japanese satellite system called ASTER.

3.  Mountain pine beetle population dynamics

Mountain pine beetles represent a major forest disturbance phenomenon in the Rocky Mountain regions, and more recently, in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.  Mountain pine beetles are interesting mathematically as they disperse by a combination of random movement and pheremone mediated aggregation.  I am working to develop a relatively simple model that will (hopefully) capture some of the major spatial characteristics evident in maps of historical damage I have compiled for Yellowstone National Park.

I am also interested in understanding how landscape heterogeneity affects mountain pine beetles dynamics.  Specifically, I hope to understand if/how spatial patterns of mountain pine beetle damage differ between the pre-fire (1963-1987) Yellowstone regime and the post-fire (1989-present) Yellowstone regime.

Computer Code

My research involves a lot of programming, and to this end, I've written a lot of code over the last three years.  In the hopes that some of it might be useful to others, I have linked to it here.

Programs in R:

Stayed tuned!

Talks:

2005:

2003:

• Talk at the Harvard University Herbaria: "Fire-insect dynamics: A Statistical Approach"

Links to Data and Related Literature

Yellowstone Ecological Research Center  

GIS data for Yellowstone National Park

Digital Atlas of Wyoming
British Columbia Natural Disturbance Database
National Climatic Data Center
USDA Forest Service: Bark Beetle Research Papers