Mike Koontz, PhD
@mikoontz.bsky.social
Plant ecology and geospatial data science to reduce fire and climate change risk to ecosystems and communities. Lead Scientist @ Vibrant Planet Formerly: USGS Fire Ecologist; CU Boulder; UC Davis; Colorado State University; UH Hilo Location: Colorado
Loved the intertwining of Hugh’s and Brian’s work in this piece!
John R. Platt@johnrplatt.bsky.social · 11h agoJeffrey pines shouldn’t be found 12,657 feet up a mountain — but that’s where they’ve turned up in California’s Sequoia National Park. How did they get there? And what does their arrival tell us about #climatechange, forest composition & California’s fiery future? therevelator.org/california-t...
Check out @olross.bsky.social's new preprint on matching methods for field ecology! In our efforts to randomize plot selection, we've overlooked a more fundamental issue: the treatments themselves—e.g., disturbances—are rarely randomized! PSM provides a solution 🧪🍁 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Questions sparked by this story: 1) Could Rx & cultural burns reduce emissions and increase sequestration in the southern Sierra, or do they only flatten emissions peaks & troughs, w/ no added C storage? 2) Could Tribal burning initiatives generate revenue from the California cap-and-trade program?
Firing up carbon credits through cultural burning - The Australian Museum Blog
australian.museum
Aupa #ESA2026 ! Stop by poster 054 today (Tuesday) 5-6:30pm to learn about how climate change is affecting eguzkilore 🌻 a culturally important plant in the Basque Country
There will not always be extreme wildfire outbreaks when exceptional heat and dryness occur, that is true. But such conditions greatly raise the ceiling on what is possible in a warming world--and sometimes, as is happening now, that increased potential will be realized.
Many of these fires, from British Columbia to the South of France, have exhibited extreme behavior even when ambient winds have been modest. This has largely been due to deep pyroconvective development, including full-fledged fire-generated thunderstorms.
Do I have any Northern California colleagues affected by NIH nonsense? Send me a DM!
As Nahel discusses below, this event was caused by an extreme downslope (foehn) wind event--but that, in turn, was amplified by very warm & moist airmass generating huge snowfalls in high elevation Andes due to record-warm ocean waters in eastern tropical Pacific. #ElNiño
Nahel Belgherze@wxnb.bsky.social · 2w agoI've never seen anything like it. Salta, Argentina, has just recorded its hottest night on record during the climatologically coldest time of the year. The minimum overnight temperature did not fall below 26°C (78.8°F), pulverizing the previous monthly record by 7°C.
I’m looking to recruit a postdoc to join my research group at University of Iowa to work on disturbance ecology and biodiversity! Start date flexible, lots of opportunity for skill development, collaboration, and mentorship. Will review applicants in mid-August! Link: gavinmjones.com/opportunities/
Opportunities
BIG NEWS! The Jones Lab will be relocating to the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability (SEES) at the University of Iowa in Fall 2026. Our work on disturbance ecology and conservation sc…
gavinmjones.com
U. Iowa is hiring an open-rank TT prof. working on “environmental governance and policy in the context of the environmental, social, and/or economic drivers related to climate change from local to global scales” Join this vibrant and growing academic unit! More here: jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view...
New paper in Fire Ecology: what actually makes a wildfire "extreme"? Current definitions rely on rigid thresholds that don't hold up across ecosystems. We argue for judging fire behavior, ecological outcomes, and social impacts against historical baselines. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Roadmap for the future of extreme wildfire events - Fire Ecology
Background Extreme wildfire events (EWEs) represent a growing threat globally, posing substantial risks to ecosystems, human communities, and infrastructure. Despite increased recognition of their eco...
link.springer.com
Read "War, climate change, and land use shape wildfire dynamics in Ukraine, 2001–2024" by Anastasiia Zymaroieva, Serhii Sydorenko, Olha Kunakh, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Olexander Zhukov in the #FireEcology Journal #SNFECO https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-026-00527-y
The #AspenAcresFire, still burning quite actively along southern Colorado Front Range & having destroyed ~200 structures thus far, has become an exceptionally complex & challenging event from a firefighting perspective due to a confluence of climate, weather, & geography. [Thread]
New article! We went to Tucson for a few weeks back in 2019 and looked at some plants and took quite a few soil samples. We found that buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) invasion was associated with lower plant diversity, and soil carbon. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) invasion is associated with reduced plant diversity and changes in carbon storage in the Sonoran Desert
Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) is a perennial bunchgrass, invasive in arid ecosystems of the United States, Australia, and Mexico. Buffelgrass invas…
kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me
NOAA has extended the highest-tier "extremely critical" fire weather risk into Saturday, and shifts the maximum risk zone eastward from the Great Basin to Rocky Mountain western slope. Multiple new wildfires, most likely lightning holdovers, are currently popping up in Utah.
New paper documenting impacts of drought on birds in the already arid SW US. 🦉🌐🌎 TLDR: It's not good. * Abundance declines in response to drought for most species * In this region drought-related declines in the south may be pushing ranges northward conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Long‐Term Drought Exposure Shapes Declines and Range Shifts in Aridland Birds
Climate change increases drought frequencies and intensities, posing risks to biodiversity. Species inhabiting arid regions may be vulnerable to drought because they live near their physiological lim...
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Very excited to see this paper out! Led by @schwilk.org, with @azhar06.bsky.social @ecologybrad.bsky.social @rachaelnolan.bsky.social @alefidelis.bsky.social @ioliverasmenor.bsky.social @dendromecon27.bsky.social @profalistairsmith.bsky.social bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
From plant traits to fire behavior: Scaling issues in flammability studies
Despite fire being one of the oldest and most important ecological disturbance processes on Earth, many aspects of fire–vegetation feedbacks are poorly understood, limiting their accurate representat...
bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Very neat new short course offered by @caltech.edu on computer vision for ecology! cv4ecology.caltech.edu/index.html
CV4Ecology Workshop
cv4ecology.caltech.edu
Mechanisms of coexistence are often unintuitive; Werner et al. explore species interactions across different environmental scenarios to bridge theoretical and empirical approaches to coexistence. 🧪🌍💚 Check out this great press summary of our recent AmNat paper! www.amnat.org/an/newpapers...
Coexistence across time and life histories
<p>Read about “Fluctuation-dependent coexistence of stage-structured species” by Chhaya M. Werner, Lauren M. Hallett, and Lauren G. Shoemaker (Mar 2025)</p><br/><br/><p><b>Mechanisms ...
amnat.org
Excited for @kalebgoff.bsky.social's 1st dissertation chapter to be out w co-authors M Oldfather, J Nachlinger, B Smithers, @mikoontz.bsky.social, J & C Bishop & M Burke. Limited Directional Change in Mountaintop Plant Communities over 19 years in Western North America doi.org/10.1002/ecs2...
IMTs are quietly talking about what the current political environment means for this year's wildland fire suppression efforts, but it deserves a larger and more public consideration. 1/
“decimate” Despite my demographic, I think about the Roman Empire zero (0) times per day. But I do like words. Paul Brians taught me that “decimate” refers to eliminating 10% of people in an “unruly” unit as punishment. ~220k probies/~2.4m total… The Federal Service is being decimated.
Whew, been a busy weekend, happy to get this quick episode out to explain how these federal cuts will impact fire response this summer. Give it a listen at the link.
Murphy Woodhouse@murphywoodhouse.bsky.social · last yr.Think the limitations to non-fire positions means these public lands firings won’t affect fire operations? Think again. Listen to/folo @amonthei.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...
Ever wonder what snow in the swamp would look like? This is 5 miles into the Louisiana swamps in the Atchafalaya basin... it's unreal... having lived down there for the first 28 years of my life, we never saw anything like this. Smashed records. Curtesy of Garrett Roberts.
