Background, Research Interests, and Current Projects:
Sarah received her B.A. in biology from Concordia University, Irvine, in 2004, and spent a year skiing before attending graduate school. She is fascinated by the emergent properties, feedbacks, and nonlinearities inherent to ecosystems.
For her M.S., Sarah has been modeling interactions between fire, vegetation, and nutrient cycling at the landscape scale. She and her collaborators developed a nutrient cycling module for the LANDIS-II forest dynamics simulation model and are using it to examine historical and current nutrient cycling patterns in the Lake Tahoe Basin .
Currently, Sarah is beginning to research woody plant population dynamics in relation to fire, historic land use, and groundwater at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a springs complex at the border of the Great Basin and Mojave Deserts. She is especially interested in the resilience of the ecosystem in relation to the legacy of pervasive human land use. |
