ENHS Nature Trails Nov 98 Article 1

This month's speaker: Cathy Whitlock

Nature Trails conducted a brief interview with our speaker:

WERE YOU INTERESTED IN NATURE AS A CHILD? Yes, I grew up in Colorado, spent lots of time hiking in the Rockies and canyon country. Our family hobby was collecting butterflies. In the summer, we would travel across the country with our nets and jars, and in the winter we would mount and identify specimens. It was the source of a lot of good science fair projects for me.

PARENTAL INFLUENCES? My dad is a medical school professor, and I always figured I would become a doctor. My first geology course in college changed my mind.

ANY NATURE HOBBIES? I live on a farm in Alpine, and my husband and I are avid birders and gardeners. I also enjoy hiking and reading mysteries.

MEMORABLE TRAVELS? I mark 1988--the year that Yellowstone National Park was on fire--as a turning point in my research. I spent a lot of time that summer dodging in and out of burning forests to collect pollen samples for my research on vegetation history. I was being very single-minded about my project and was somewhat annoyed by all the roadblocks and closed areas in the Park. It dawned on me half way through that field season that I was overlooking a truly significant ecological event--a fire that happened perhaps once every few centuries. I realized then that variation in fire frequency was probably one cause of long-term vegetation change. The experience of those fires shifted the scope of my research and now we are studying prehistoric fires in a variety of areas, including the Rocky Mountains, Klamath Mountains, Cascades, and Coast Range.

WHO INFLUENCED YOU TO PURSUE STUDIES IN ECOLOGY? In college, I worked with Estella Leopold at the U.S. Geological Survey for a summer job. Estella is a very dynamic person and at the time I thought she had the most wonderful, exciting career studying fossil pollen and reconstructing past environments. When Estella became director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington--that was the place for me as far as a graduate program.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO GEOGRAPHY? My training is in geology and ecology, but my interests fit very well in geography with its focus on environmental change, both natural and human-caused. Did you know that the week of my talk is National Geography Awareness Week? I hope to show people that geography is more than maps.

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR TRAINING? BA from Colorado College; MS, Ph.D. from University of Washington. I spent a glorious year on a NATO Postdoc in Ireland studying the of peatlands of County Kerry.

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO OUR TOWN? Before coming to UO I was working at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. The job was wonderful in that it allowed me to work all over the world. I missed not having graduate students and the opportunity to build a teaching and research program. Much of my research has focused on the history of the Pacific Northwest, so when UO had an opening for a biogeographer I jumped at the chance to come here.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR CURRENT WORK? Scientists are in a race to understand how the environment will be affected by climate changes in the future. Their efforts rely in large part on the use of sophisticated computer models, which compare the present-day climate with that resulting from increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Current research suggests that the ecological changes accompanying global warming will be enormous and unprecedented. The changes also challenge current efforts by land management agencies and conservation groups to protect and preserve present-day ecosystems. But, how reliable are future projections? A key way to test climate models is to determine how well they can simulate the past. In my talk this Friday I will explain how the fossil record is used to reconstruct past climates, and why these efforts are critical in global change research. I will also present some new results that look at the future of Northwest forests. My colleagues and I in the Department of Geography are leaders in the field of past and future environmental change. We have been actively studying the region's vegetation, climate, and fire history, and using this information to better understand ecosystem response. Current research is highlighted on the Geography Department Environmental Change web page http://geography.uoregon.edu/envchange/.

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