David Andison - Project Coordinator

David Andison is a consultant, the Program Lead of the fRI Research Healthy Landscapes Program, and an Adjunct Professor at the UBC Faculty of Forestry. He has spent much of his career understanding and modelling fire behaviour, but his passion lies in better understanding how natural ecosystems work and using that knowledge to better manage forested landscapes. However, David has come to the humbling conclusion that science alone is rarely enough to affect change. His efforts have thus expanded to include developing decision-support tools, engaging in dialogue, and developing and supporting outreach and education tools.

John Stadt - Science-Policy Advisor

John Stadt is the Provincial Forest Ecologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, where he translates science knowledge to forest managers and policy makers. He enjoys this role as it raises many questions about how forests function and change through time and how human activities affect them. These questions have led to his engagement in new science projects dealing with forest biodiversity and the impacts of harvest, climate change, fire, and mountain pine beetle. John was introduced to Alberta’s forests while studying long-term natural changes in Rocky Mountain lodgepole pine forests and never ceases to be amazed at how dynamic forests are.

Lori Daniels - Fire Regime Team Lead

Lori Daniels is a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Forest and Conservation Sciences Department at UBC-Vancouver. She is a tree-ring nerd: Lori directs the Tree-Ring Lab at UBC where she investigates and reconstructs past disturbances like forest fires and insect outbreaks, plus the impacts of climate and humans on forest change. With her research team at UBC, Lori is researching wildfires and forest resilience to climate change in the foothills of Alberta, interior BC, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. She serves on BC’s Prescribed Fire and Fire Smart Councils and is member of the Canadian Wildfire Subject Matter Expert Committee.

Cameron Naficy - Post-Doctoral Fellow (completed), Fire Regime Team

Cameron is a landscape ecologist focusing on the causes and consequences of pattern in ecological systems. He has extensive research experience in the Rocky Mountains of North America and in mountainous regions of Patagonia, New Zealand and Tasmania. Cameron completed his post-doc with the Tree-Ring Lab in 2020, and he is now a Research Ecologist with the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University.

Eric Higgs - Visual Applications Team Lead

Eric Higgs is a Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, and Past Chair of the Society for Ecological Restoration. He directs the Mountain Legacy Project, which over the last two decades has repeated more than 7,000 historical survey photographs, many of them in the southern Rockies. His work has helped to establish the image analysis methods which will enable researchers to track landscape change over a century or longer. His research is motivated by a sense of optimism that a better understanding of landscapes will lead to positive change.

Mary Sanseverino - Senior Researcher, Visual Applications Team

Mary is a Teaching Professor Emerita in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Victoria. A long-time mountaineer and photographer, Mary’s research interests involve work with computational photography, making her a good fit with the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) and the Landscapes in Motion Visual Applications team. She has been associated with MLP since 2010, going out into the field in every year from 2012 to 2018, and even in 2019 with a new hip!

Julie Fortin - Graduate student (completed), Visual Applications Team

Julie worked closely with Michael Whitney and Mary Sanseverino out of the Mountain Legacy Project lab to develop software for extracting spatially explicit data from oblique photographs. Their work provides an additional line of evidence into historical fire patterns in southwestern Alberta. She completed her M.Sc. in 2018 and now works in the Land Use and Global Environment lab at the University of British Columbia.

Eliot McIntire - Modelling Team Lead

Eliot McIntire is a researcher from the Canadian Forest Service’s Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, BC, and an adjunct professor at both University of Laval and UBC Forestry. While he got into ecology to have fun outside skiing across glaciers to find pikas in Yukon and climbing Patagonian mountains to detect climate effects on southern forests, he is now stuck (happily) behind computers trying to solve some of the "Big Data problems".  He is the leader of the SpaDES project and specializes in using computer models to understand how landscapes change over time. As a past Canada Research Chair at the University of Laval, Eliot’s focus has included understanding boreal wildfires and how to model them.

Ceres Barros - Post-Doctoral Fellow (completed), Modelling Team

Ceres is an ecological modeller who’s passionate about how ecosystems cope with disturbances like climate warming and land-use change. She enjoys looking at the big picture and understanding these dynamics at landscape to regional scales, across different types of ecosystems and in complex situations with many drivers (e.g., climate, fire, land-use) and players (e.g., many species of trees, accounting for interactions between species).

Fire Regime Team

Field work: S. Ravensbergen, O. Fitzpatrick, A. Many Grey Horses, C. A. Umrysh, I. Mott, R. Martell, A. Howard, and A. Gonczar.

Laboratory work: S. Bronson, D. Fluharty, D. Saelle, and C. A. Umrysh.

Additional thanks: Noreen Plain Eagle (Piikani Lands Manager) from the Piikani First Nation for logistical support and permission to sample in the Piikani Timber Limit B. John Stadt (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry), Ryan Good (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry), and fRI Research provided critical logistical support. Thanks to M-P Rogeau for contribution of fire scar data and valuable discussion.

Visual Applications Team

Many thanks to James Tricker, Spencer Rose and Chris Stockdale.

MLP gratefully acknowledges our research partners and collaborators at Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada LAC/BAC. Their sustained care and curation of Canada’s heritage as well as their commitment to sharing it with researchers enables us to carry the Mountain Legacy Project forward.

We also acknowledge with gratitude and humility the outstanding efforts of MLP field crews past and present. Without their enthusiasm, passion, care, and dedication none of this work would be possible.

Modelling Team

Many thanks to Tatiane Micheletti (UBC), Steve Cumming (Université Laval), Ian Eddy (Pacific Forestry Centre), and Dan Perrakis (Pacific Forestry Centre).