Two students awarded the Wayne Harrison Memorial Scholarship in 2025
The Wayne Harrison Memorial Scholarship supports academic and professional growth of students through funding research, management, or education projects related to wildland fire science. AFE received seven strong applications for the scholarship this year, and a panel of four judges independently reviewed, scored the applications, and selected two awardees.
Congratulations to Kathleen Gabler and Angie Liotta!
Reigniting the Landscape: Post-Fire Tree Mortality Following Reintroduction Burns in Long-Unburned Montane Longleaf Forests
Kathleen Gabler, Doctoral Student
Auburn University College of Forestry, Wildlife, and Environment
Awarded $2500
Reintroducing fire into long-unburned ecosystems presents unique challenges, including unexpected patterns of tree damage and mortality. My dissertation research examines how tree species traits, fire history, and post-fire responses interact to shape overstory mortality patterns in montane longleaf pine and mixed oak-pine systems of central and northeastern Alabama. These forests, many of which have not burned for decades, are now receiving “re-entry” prescribed fires under restoration efforts.
This project focuses on quantifying delayed mortality and measures of vitality following both prescribed and wild fires across three sites: Flagg Mountain, Mountain Longleaf National Wildlife Refuge, and Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge. To better understand how duff depth and basal damage contribute to delayed tree mortality, I installed permanent reference pins around the bases of mature pine trees—particularly longleaf and shortleaf—with accumulated duff mounds. These pins allow precise measurement of post-fire duff consumption and smoldering activity, which are often key contributors to cambial injury and root collar damage. By monitoring duff reduction and relating it to tree mortality, I aim to quantify the relationship between belowground fire effects and overstory loss. This method provides an important link between surface fire behavior and longer-term tree outcomes, especially in long-unburned stands where duff accumulation is substantial. In the continuation of this work of monitoring mortality, I am specifically examining how previously measured individual tree-level metrics (species, diameter, crown condition, bark char, etc.) and their relationship to post-fire survival and vitality measurements over the next two growing seasons. This work builds on existing collaborations with The Nature Conservancy and US Fish and Wildlife teams and is grounded in real-time fire operations.
My methods include pre- and post-fire tree tagging and assessment, coupled with seasonal monitoring. I will integrate this with previously collected site-level burn data (e.g., char height, fire severity metrics) and analyze mortality and vitality metrics. The work will be continued over the next two growing seasons (spring 2025–fall 2026), with field campaigns planned in spring and fall for assessment, data collection, and re-measurements.
I am the sole Ph.D. student leading this work and will be responsible for study design, fieldwork, analysis, and manuscript preparation in collaboration with my advisor, Dr. Heather D. Alexander. The project contributes to applied fire science by offering new insight into post-fire tree mortality risk, which is critical for informing reintroduction burn planning and prioritizing tree retention or purposeful removal following fire. The findings will be shared with land managers and fire practitioners across the Southeast through association presentations, partnership with the Alabama Prescribed Fire Council, and AFE conferences. I hope this work can support more nuanced decision-making around re-entry fire application.
Wildfire mediated changes to structural and compositional stand heterogeneity
Angie Liotta, Doctoral Student
University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
Awarded $2500
This project will be an extension of my current research, which quantifies wildfire effects on local forest structure and composition across a diverse environmental gradient, with the aim of helping forest managers identify areas vulnerable to subsequent wildfire and where active management may be needed to meet restoration objectives. I propose to extend my research by including a modified version of the Fire Resistance Score (FRS), developed by Stevens et al. (2020), to evaluate how species traits influence both the survival of individual trees after wildfire and the fire resistance of stands to future wildfires. FRS will be modified to operate at the individual tree level, allowing for a more nuanced evaluation of how fire resistance traits relate to post-fire structural outcomes. While FRS has been successfully applied at the landscape scale, its use at the individual tree or stand scale has not been tested or validated. This project will (1) evaluate whether FRS predict the probability of individual tree survival, and (2) compare stand aggregates of post-fire FRS to those from reference forests to assess how closely post-fire forest structure aligns with desired conditions.
To carry out this work, I will use data from 26 wildfires (>400 hectare) across Washington, where structural data and tree survival outcomes have been collected. I will obtain and analyze existing data from two reference sites: one located in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, Washington, and another in Colville National Forest. Reference forests represent ecological conditions where frequent-fire forest structure and composition have been maintained, providing a valuable benchmark for post-fire management outcomes.
My role in this extension will be to lead all analyses, including calculating FRS for each individual tree, modeling survival probability in relation to FRS, and aggregating FRS to plot scale for comparison across fire-affected and reference sites. This will allow me to evaluate the extent to which surviving forest structures resemble reference conditions, and to identify where and how post-fire forest structure may be departing from restoration goals.
Funding will support data acquisition from agency partners, travel for site visits, and time to conduct necessary analyses. I plan to visit one or both reference forests and a subset of the post-fire plots to better understand the forest structures I am analyzing. These visits will also help me engage with agency collaborators and gain firsthand insight into the conditions that managers are working to restore.
This project is planned for completion in one year. I will acquire and prepare reference forest datasets in early summer, followed by analytical work and site visits during summer and early fall. Results will be incorporated into my dissertation and presented at the International Fire Ecology and Management Congress in December 2025. The project will provide useful insights for managers seeking to understand whether post-fire outcomes are consistent with resilience-based restoration objectives.
