April 24th, 2025 from 12pm to 1pm EDT
Speaker: Eva Legge
Bio: Eva Legge is a first-year PhD student at Syracuse University in Dr. Chris Fernandez’ Mycorrhizal Ecology Lab, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Mollie Beattie Visiting Scholar with the Society of American Foresters. Her research aims to bridge the gap between basic mycorrhizal research and climate-adaptive silviculture. She earned her BA in Biology from Dartmouth College in 2023, where she researched the role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in climate-adaptive forest management. She is also a freelance science writer and a staff member at science-to-society nonprofit the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation.
Webinar: Stressors to the temperate forests of eastern North America are numerous, ranging from more frequent drought conditions to increasing wildfires. Future climates of eastern forests will thus favor drought-tolerant, shade-intolerant, and fire-adapted species like oaks (Quercus spp.) that were historically abundant in open-canopy woodlands and savannas maintained by fire frequent, low-intensity fire maintained by indigenous populations for millennia. However, these future climate-adapted species are presently struggling to regenerate. Widespread fire suppression after European colonization has led to “mesophication”: a positive feedback loop whereby forest densification promotes darker, wetter, and cooler understories and pyrophobic tree species like maples (Acer spp.) that further promote such conditions and outcompete pyrophititic species like oaks. Restoring fire and canopy disturbance can reverse this process, but success in regenerating oaks has been mixed, perhaps due to the lack of research on how fire suppression may interact with plant-soil feedbacks to drive the mesophication process. In this talk I will lay out the conceptual framework for how such “plant-soil-fire feedbacks” may be an overlooked but important driver of mesophication, outline my current and future research testing this theory, and highlight potential management applications.
