UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) will host a two-part celebration to honor the career of Alan Taylor, professor emeritus of forest ecology. The first is a symposium, “Forests of Change: Looking to the Past to Understand the Future - Reflections on a Career,” which will be held from 3:30 to 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11, in 112 Walker Building on the University Park campus. The symposium also be available on Zoom.

The second, a “Celebration of Achievements,” will be held on Saturday, Oct. 12, at Mount Nittany Winery, where attendees will be able to share remarks and appreciation for Taylor's contribution to geography and the EESI community. Both events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP for the “Celebration of Achievements” Saturday event.

Taylor served as interim director of the EESI from July 2021 to December 2022.

“Alan’s career has left an indelible mark on our University community and the disciplines of forestry and fire science,” said Erica Smithwick, distinguished professor of geography and director of EESI. “His research has unraveled the complex interactions underlying wildfire and forest change, showing the importance of past and ongoing human and climate factors.”

The symposium will feature three speakers who will talk about Taylor’s influence on their own careers and the discipline:

• Valérie Trouet: “Wildfire, Jet Stream, and People: A Long History”
  Trouet is a professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona and is currently serving as the scientific director of the Belgian Climate Centre. She is a dendroclimatologist who uses the rings in trees to study the climate of the past and how it has influenced ecosystems and human history. She has published more than 100 scientific publications and is the author of the book “Tree Story; The History of the World Written in Rings” published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020. She is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from Wageningen University in the Netherlands in 2023. She received her doctorate in bioscience engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium in 2004. After earning her doctorate, she joined Penn State as a postdoctoral scholar in Taylor’s lab. She said that her two years as a postdoc in Taylor’s lab was the start of a long-lasting, fun and productive collaboration.

• Lucas Harris: “Legacy Effects, Reburns and Interactions Between Forests and Wildfire”
  Harris is a postdoctoral associate in the Rubensteil School of Environmental and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Much of his current research focuses on regional-scale patterns of tree regeneration across the Northeast and its implications for future forests. Lucas earned his master’s degree in 2014 and his doctorate in 2019, both in geography from Penn State. He also was a postdoctoral scholar with Taylor from 2019 to 2022. Taylor was his academic adviser for his degrees and supervised his postdoctoral research. He worked with Taylor on a range of topics, including drivers of fire severity patterns, reburn dynamics and post-fire tree regeneration.

• Carl Skinner: “How Studying Fire History Helps to Inform our Understanding of Long-Term Forest Dynamics in Complex Landscapes”
  Skinner is a retired research geographer with 46 years with the U.S. Forest Service. His first 20 years were in fire management focusing first on fire suppression followed by research in fuels management including overseeing a large, prescribed fire program. He then spent 26 years at the Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) in Redding, California, researching how fire, climate and management activities interact to influence forest vegetation dynamics and fire hazard. He first met Taylor in 1990, shortly after joining PSW: Taylor was working on a project in the Swain Mountain Experimental Forest and Skinner was asked to help his project by removing fire-scarred samples from live trees. Working together, they realized they had similar research interests, and this led to a long, productive research collaboration and continuing friendship. Skinner has authored or co-authored more than 90 scientific publications and served as lead scientist for PSW before retiring in 2014. In 2022, he was awarded the Harold Biswell Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Fire Ecology. Skinner has degrees from Shasta Community College in Redding, California; University of California, Berkeley; and California State University, Chico.

Taylor officially retired in December 2023, but he said 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.

He currently is he’s 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.

Read the article, “Taylor’s research legacy shines light on California wildfires, forest ecology,” to learn more.