Job Type: Postdoc, on-site
Location: North Carolina State University - Raleigh, NC
Pay: $65,000/year
Starting: Late 2026 or Spring 2027
Two related Postdoctoral Research positions will be available soon in the Department of Forestry and Environment Resources at North Carolina State University. The positions require similar skills, although the purpose, funding, and collaborators differ. The two Postdocs will work together and with their respective teams, ensuring an immersive and carefully mentored experience.
NOTE: Applications are NOT being accepted at this time. These positions have not yet been posted and the information is being shared so that interested parties can reach out to to ask questions and/or indicate their interest.
Purpose:
Forest landscape models (FLMs) provide projections of potential futures across large landscapes based on the drivers underlying forest landscape dynamics, including disturbances, succession, management, and changing weather patterns over time. These projections are subsequently used to inform local and regional partners (e.g., USFS, DoW) about potential policies, strategies, or actions necessary to maintain desired landscape functioning. These projects will use the LANDIS-II (www.landis-ii.org) FLM, which enables each project to account for regionally appropriate dynamic disturbances (e.g., wildfire, prescribed fire, and hurricanes), climatic changes (e.g., drought), and management response to these changes. LANDIS-II will allow us to estimate a broad suite of ecosystem services, including carbon, water yield, habitat, timber production, and fire risk. Each team, described below, has broad and deep expertise in FLMs and LANDIS-II.
Duties, Responsibilities, and Skills:
Each postdoctoral researcher will: 1) attend and participate in team meetings to determine appropriate hypotheses and to develop model scenarios for testing these scenarios; 2) be responsible for landscape model input data preparation and/or model parameterization and calibration; 3) run scenarios and analyze data output; 4) draft and submit manuscripts for publication as well as report and present findings to agency personnel and in public academic settings.
Expected Start Date:
Early 2027. Funding is available for 2.0 - 2.5 years (depending on the specific project), contingent on positive evaluation at the end of the first year.
Salary and Benefits:
Salary will be $65,000 / year, plus benefits. Funding for site travel and conferences is included.
Requirements:
PhD degree obtained by the time of appointment. Advanced degrees in Forestry, Ecology, Resource Management, Geography, Environmental Science, or any other relevant field. Experience manipulating large spatial datasets, including GeoTIFF rasters, using R or Python is required. Experience with Google Earth Engine and C# is desirable. Experience with forest landscape modeling and a record of publication and grant writing experience preferred.
Project 1: FIRE-MODEL: Impacts of rapid shifts of moisture availability on regional landscapes, forest hydrology and flammability
If interested, contact Dr. Katie Martin at katie_martin@ncsu.edu
Mentor: The postdoc will be supervised, mentored, and evaluated by Katie Martin and co-mentored by Robert Scheller.
PIs and Co-PIs: Katie Martin (NC State) Robert Scheller (NC State), Chris Oishi (USFS), Katia Fernandes (NC State), Josh Gray (NC State)
Funding source: NSF
Specific duties: As listed above. The postdoc will work closely with team members to integrate fuel moisture into the FLM fire sub-model. The postdoc will co-lead scenario co-development workshops with Co-PI Scheller.
Grant Overview
The goal of our transdisciplinary, multi-institutional research group is to begin addressing the most critical gaps in our understanding of wildfire in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. This region is characterized by a mosaic of highly productive and diverse forests interspersed and an extensive wildland-urban interface (WUI) where wildfire activity has accelerated over the last decade, increasing risks to human health and safety. A wide range of forest disturbances and dry conditions are likely to increase fire risk, and details of these processes are complex. Here, we will specifically focus on fuel loading and moisture availability from the forest to regional scales driven by hydroclimate whiplashes. Our central hypothesis is that increasingly frequent oscillations between extreme wet and dry periods increase fire risk by adding fuels that dry rapidly.
Our convergent approach to address the hypothesis includes four cross-scale hypotheses that we will address with multiple approaches. 1. Increasing wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplashes amplify fire risk by compounding the disturbance of very wet events (e.g., hurricanes and atmospheric rivers) with the subsequent consequences of high atmospheric water demand on fuel moisture. We will characterize regional whiplash events and analyze their relationship with burned areas and large-scale climatic cycles. 2. Extreme wet events result in large pulses of downed woody biomass, which can dry rapidly and exacerbate fire risk. We will characterize fuel loading and moisture loss by combining longer term, more extensive data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis dataset with additional field data and a multifactorial fuel drying experiment. 3. New geocomputational approaches will increase the spatiotemporal resolution and accuracy of fuel load and moisture mapping. Using Earth observation data and new geofoundation approaches, we will model regional fuel dynamics across this humid region of complex terrain. 4. Improving fuel moisture dynamics modeling in rapidly drying conditions will improve projections thus increase preparedness.
We will incorporate the knowledge gained in Objectives 1-3 into the LANDIS-II forest dynamics model to produce scenarios of fire spread and severity under different climatic conditions determined in collaboration with stakeholders.
Intellectual Merit
Knowledge gained in this proposal will fill gaps in our understanding of wildfire risk in humid forest regions where baseline fuel moisture is high, but risky fire conditions are increasingly common, causing health and safety concerns across a pervasive WUI. Integrating hydroclimate dynamics, forest ecohydrology, remote sensing, geocomputation, and process-based modeling, we will quantify the fire risk posed by hydroclimate whiplashes and their connections to interannual and multi-decadal hydroclimate patterns. Thus, we will advance our capacity to anticipate and reduce fire risk through forest management and fire-adaptive policies.
Broader Impacts
In the context of increasingly frequent extreme fire weather, there is an urgent need to expand our understanding of wildfires in the southern Appalachians and mesic forests. Using the advanced understanding of fuel loading and moisture gained throughout the project, we will work with our stakeholders to co-develop management scenarios that test fire-adaptive management policies against contemporary (business-as-usual) forest management to improve safety in rural WUI communities and beyond. Our proposal will also provide training in convergent science to address complex challenges for two graduate students and one postdoc at NC State as well as one graduate student at Mississippi State.
Project 2: Regional Mechanisms That Drive Ecosystem Transformations of Southeastern Fire-Dependent Pine Ecosystems
If interested, contact Dr. Robert Scheller at rschell@ncsu.edu
Mentor: The postdoc will be supervised, mentored, and evaluated by Robert Scheller.
PIs and Co-PIs: Robert Scheller (NC State), Carlos A. Silva (U Florida), Jeff Cannon (Jones Center), Louise Loudermilk (USFS), Steve Flannagan (USFS), Bill Hoffmann (NC State), Sam Flake (Cary Institute)
Funding source: Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP): 2.5 years of funding available, in total.
Specific duties: As listed above. The postdoc will work closely with team members to integrate their data into the FLM, particularly regarding hurricane frequency and behavior, and management for hurricane generated fuels. The postdoc will co-lead scenario co-development workshops with PI Scheller. (USFS will be responsible for generating baseline inputs into the model.)
Grant Overview
Fire-adapted pine-dominated ecosystems (‘pine woodlands’, ranging from open savanna to closed-canopy forest) of the southeastern USA are at risk of transformation into hardwood forests. Our objective is to understand ongoing and future transformations of these ecosystems across the southeastern coastal plain. We will consider multiple regional mechanisms that can drive transformations, including interacting stressors, hurricanes, and the role of management in maintaining these pine woodlands. We will use multiple lines of empirical data (remote sensing, long-term inventory data, and field studies), while considering the broader landscape context, to estimate the risk of pine woodland transformations. We will use these results to forecast future rates of ecosystem transformation (vs. persistence or restoration) using a landscape change forecasting model. Our forecasts will generate spatiotemporal patterns of future ecosystem transformation, allowing us to evaluate potential management alternatives.
Specifically, we will: 1) quantify stressors – long-term mechanisms that reduce the persistence of pine woodlands, including drought and other extreme weather events, and potentially including pine beetles, wildfire, and development; 2) assess the role of hurricanes to serve as a mechanism that rapidly transforms already stressed pine woodlands into hardwood forests; 3) assess the potential for management to maintain pine woodlands, given expected rates of stressors and hurricanes; and 4) synthesize these key ecological processes and forecast where and when transformations are most likely to occur in the future, in order to prioritize management, conservation and restoration efforts.
Technical Approach
We will synthesize cohesive datasets on pine woodlands. Using a combination of long-term monitoring plots, remote sensing, and new field data collection, we will address data gaps regarding post-hurricane mortality, recovery, regeneration, and fuel loading. Synthesizing across these data sources, we will parameterize and calibrate a model of regional landscape change to forecast where and when regional ecosystem transformations are most likely to occur. We will work with our network of management partners to generate scenarios that capture a range of management actions and extreme weather events. We will focus on processes that will increase the risk of ecosystem transformation (‘interacting stressors’), trigger rapid ecosystem transformation (hurricanes), maintain desired ecosystem states, or even reverse prior transformations (active management, including extensive and frequent prescribed fire and harvesting). Our study area is the coastal plains (east of the fall line) of NC, SC, and GA, an area that encompasses both pine woodlands and mixed hardwood forests.
Benefits
Our proposal directly addresses the FY2026 SON by meeting the SON objectives to, (1) Investigate the interactions among environmental factors that drive ecosystem transformations, and (2) Disentangle the key ecological processes and develop mechanistic models of transformation. Pine woodlands have exceptionally high biodiversity and high endemism, yet many are shifting towards dominance by hardwoods, especially in areas outside of DoD installations. The regional maintenance and management of these ecosystems is a high priority for DoD installations that encompass biodiversity hotspots. Maintaining southeastern pine woodlands supports meeting regulatory requirements (ESA) while simultaneously supporting a wildland structural environment ideal for military testing and training. Our co-production efforts through the Eastern Innovation Landscape Network will ensure management relevance of our data collection and model forecasts.
