Postdoc in post-fire vegetation succession (Canada)

The long and intense fire season of 2014 saw 3.4 million ha of forested lands impacted by wildfires in the Northwest Territories (NWT), which made this the highest-impact fire season in the NWT’s history. We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow to lead an interdisciplinary field team of graduate and undergraduate students in the establishment of long-term monitoring sites in the 2014 burns (2015 field season) and across a chronosequence of historical burn sites (2016 and 2017 field seasons). This individual would be responsible for leading the forest succession and ground vegetation recovery component with a view to improved understanding of the response of high latitude boreal ecosystems to extreme fire years. The ultimate goal of this work is the incorporation of these successional data within boreal forest dynamics models under development at the Canadian Forest Service.

Required skills: A PhD in ecology, environmental science, or closely related field. Strong boreal
vegetation identification skills and fire ecology experience would be preferable. Required skills
may include proficiency in spatial statistics, working knowledge of ArcGIS or another comparable
GIS platform, and experience sampling and analyzing dendrochronological datasets. Candidates
will have demonstrated ability to publish high quality peer-reviewed
 papers. To apply please send
PDF copy of your CV and a letter of interest by email to Jennifer Baltzer (jbaltzer@wlu.ca).

Project supervisors: Jennifer Baltzer (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Jill Johnstone (University of
Saskatchewan).

Project collaborators: Fiona Schmiegelow (University of Alberta), Steve Cumming (Université Laval),
Antoni Lewkowicz (University of Ottawa) and Eliot McIntire (Canadian Forest Service)