Congratulations to Sharon Hood for being awarded 2025 Outstanding Associate Editor
Fire Ecology
Sharon Hood is a Research Ecologist at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula, MT. She studies tree mortality from fire, fire and bark beetle interactions, pine defenses, and treatment effectiveness to improve forest resilience to disturbances and stress. She received a BS in Forestry from Mississippi State University, a MS in Forestry from Virginia Tech, and a PhD in Organismal Biology and Ecology from the University of Montana. Sharon has been an AFE member since 2007 and is an AFE certified Senior Wildland Fire Ecologist. She served on the AFE board from 2016-2023, is the chairperson of the journal committee, and has been on the Fire Ecology editorial board since 2016.
Editors Note: Sharon was an easy pick for this year’s Outstanding Associate Editor. First, she is easily our most prolific and thorough AE as she has taken on at least five assignments a year for the last seven years and has done a stellar job. She is also somewhat unique in that she has a wide span of deep knowledge in a number of diverse fire ecology fields. She also serves as substitute EiC whenever the EiC is an author on a submitted paper. But that is just the start. In addition, for the last seven years she has served as Chair of the AFE Publications Committee that oversees the journal. She is mostly responsible for the journal becoming the impactful publication that it is today by steering the transition of the journal from a small AFE publication to one of the top ecological journals in the world. By her guidance, the journal’s impact factor has tripled, downloads have increased by a factor of 10, and submissions have quadrupled. Thank you, Sharon, for all you have done for the journal. This is an honor well deserved.
