UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — All great researchers can point to a time where a key moment shaped their now defined career. Although, for most, it likely doesn’t remain as vivid as it does for Alan Taylor.

The recently retired and now professor emeritus of geography at Penn State recounts the moments his career focus shifted to the West Coast landscape and fire ecology.

It dates back to the early 1990s, when he was conducting research to help protect the Virunga Mountains habitat of Rwanda and the Congo’s mountain gorilla population — then around 600 but now around 1,000. It was there when he received word that a civil war was breaking out and armed militias would soon be heading through one of the national parks, en route to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Taylor was hunkered down in a Kigali stairwell for the night, awaiting evacuation, when he made the decision to shift his research focus to more stable lands.

“It was absolutely scary. It was terrifying,” Taylor said. “I had my wife and my two-year-old daughter with me as we sat in a stairwell with the house guard as tracer fire went on all around us. I thought, oh my god, what have I done here? I had no idea it was going to erupt like that. We all got out safely, but it certainly was sobering.”

Working with the World Wildlife Fund

Taylor found his start working with the mountain gorilla because it shared a common food source with China’s giant panda: bamboo.

While a graduate student at the University of Colorado he took a leave to join the first international conservation effort in China. During the mid-1980s, China was experiencing a panda die off, partially due to a natural process that happens about once every 50 years where bamboo crops flower and then die back.

At the time, pandas began fleeing mountains in search of food, and when they started turning up malnourished in neighborhoods, that got the government’s attention. China invited the World Wildlife Fund in to help form a preservation solution, and Taylor worked on understanding the then endangered species’ lone food source, bamboo.

Like for the mountain gorilla, the efforts worked, and the population has rebounded.

“My work focused on how human activity in the form of logging and other kinds of disturbances to the forest influenced bamboo growth, which is the only plant pandas eat,” Taylor said. “And if you want to figure out how to conserve the animal, you have to understand their food source.”

Again, Taylor’s research allowed him to experience a unique moment in time and a culture then insulated from the outside world. He lived in a closed society and experienced China opening its borders.

Those research efforts continued when he joined Penn State in 1990. Taylor followed up on that initial bamboo research in China, shaping the science of modern ecology along the way.

“We were able to understand what happens to these bamboo forests over time after the flowering events and how different logging practices influence that recovery process,” Taylor said. “That research established some fundamental scientific principles on forestry practices in bamboo forests that are still being used today.”

Finding a place in geography

Taylor grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and was fascinated with forests. His family frequented remote areas, and he said he found a love for geography even before he knew what it was.

That love — and his interest in field work — took him to Cal State Hayward, now Cal State East Bay, for his undergraduate studies and then to graduate school at Oregon State University and the University of Colorado, which he chose because the faculty there had the same interests in ecology and biogeography. His research focused on how natural and human disturbances affect ecosystems and how that shapes their future condition.

Today, his research addresses the unprecedented severity of fires in dry forests on the western United States, which his research says is the result of fire suppression, climate change and other factors such as forest management. To accomplish this, he studies changes in forests over hundreds of years, factoring in the human footprint.

“It’s what you might call reading the landscape,” Taylor said. “We’re running the video back and forth, understanding how it’s changed.”

Today’s forests leave a lot of clues.

For example, using data from tree rings, pollen and charcoal, researchers paint a picture of what California forests looked like in the 1500s, back when Native Americans used controlled burns to improve yields of plants for food, basketry and game. These fires kept forests open with little fuel, such as grasses and shrubs, in the forest understory. Forest fires increased in extent in the 1800s, when disease brought by the Spanish decimated the Native American population, reducing indigenous fire use and increasing fuels.

The forests tell of the gold rush in 1849, when large flocks of sheep and other livestock were introduced and grazed in the forest to provide food for the mass of settlers that came to California. Livestock consumed grasses and shrubs on the forest floor, which reduced fuel, and the extent and severity of fires.

Later came the U.S. government’s successful fire suppression policy and lack of fire dramatically increased forest density and fuel on the forest floor. More fuels and hotter temperatures due to climate change that dry fuels, Taylor said, led to the massive wildfires we’re seeing today.

“These three things combined create a situation where you now get very severe wildfires that can shift ecosystem types from forest to grassland or shrublands, producing environmental conditions that are unrepresentative in environmental records in the last millennia, at least in California,” Taylor said.

Reshaping the department and beyond

Taylor’s work, which includes the human component when studying the Earth system, is a common approach in the Department of Geography and in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, where the department is housed. But it wasn’t always that way.

He was among the first wave of faculty hires of environmental geographers.

“I worked with people to try to help build that part of the department over the decades,” Taylor said. “And we were successful, through developing collaborations with key people to demonstrate the broader needs at the University level.”

Taylor’s Earth system approach to research made him the logical choice to lead the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) when longtime director Susan Brantley stepped down in 2021. He served as interim director from July 2021 to December 2022 and in that time produced a feature-length documentary focusing on the birth of interdisciplinary research on the Earth as a system at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, which was later renamed EESI.

The next chapter

Taylor officially retired in December 2023 and has been enjoying the free time traveling, visiting family, and competitively trail riding horses with his wife, Kristin. He’s also finding more time to play his guitar and go camping.

He’s also tying up some loose research ends. He has more than 30 years of work on California wildfires and it’s a chance for him to paint a larger and more accurate picture to date of how the state’s wildfires are changing. The research will shine a light on the possibility of more severe fires to come, and also help provide solutions to the acute wildfire threat.

One of the things he enjoyed about teaching is that you never really retire; there’s always a new generation of students, armed with your findings and a fresh approach to move research forward. In retirement, he might literally get to ride his horse off into the sunset, but he’s leaving decades worth of research in the capable hands of his former undergraduate and graduate students.

“One of the things I enjoyed most is working with students in the field; I had the pleasure of taking more than 150 Penn State students on field campaigns,” Taylor said. “Working with students in a research setting is where the action is. It’s something Penn State can provide across the University, and we as faculty can really have an impact by embracing those opportunities.”