SNRE welcomes affiliate faculty member

Brian Buma, assistant professor of forest ecosystem ecology at the University of Alaska Southeast, is a new affiliate faculty member with SNRE. In this role, he will serve on graduate student committees.

Brian Buma

Buma's area of expertise is landscape and disturbance ecology. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research was landscape-scale interacting disturbances and successional trajectories of recovering vegetation, resilience of corresponding ecosystem services in a changing climate and the role of management. He earned his B.S. and master's at Western Washington University.

Buma is a member of the Ecological Society of America and the International Association of Landscape Ecology.

 "I'm excited to be working up in Alaska and at UAS specifically because, as a forest ecologist, this is one of the least explored ecosystems on the planet, despite providing support for a variety of ecosystem services and endemic species," Buma said.

 

"I'm looking forward to working with UAF for several reasons. A major example is the disturbance spectrum. Your trees up there are disturbed quite often, due to lots of fires and insect mortality. Down here, the disturbance regime is much less frequent, and we have giant trees in excess of 700 years old. As a result, we can look across the entire spectrum of forest disturbances, from rapid, frequent disturbances in the boreal to extremely slow dynamics in the temperate rainforest.  That alone provides a nice contrast, and hopefully my work will dovetail well into the exciting work that ecologists are doing up there."