Forests as Complex Social and Ecological Systems

Patrick Baker is a Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the dynamics of complex forests. He has worked in forests in continental Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Sri Lanka and southern India, southeastern Australia, the Andes, western North America, and the Himalayas. His research uses dendrochronology and long-term forest inventory plots to understand how forest structure and composition change over time, how climate, disturbances, and other factors have driven these changes, and how this knowledge can inform forest management practices in a changing world.David R. Larsen is a Professor Emeritus of Quantitative Silviculture at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on the modelling of forest structure and dynamics. He has worked in forests of Western and Eastern North America, Northern Europe and Mediterranean Europe and North Eastern China. His research uses computer models of forest dynamics and ground-based remote sensing to collect and analyse spatial relationships in forests. He has also developed and used statistical methods for analysing spatially structured forest data such as restricted probability models for survival analysis, multivariate regression trees, and area potentially available in a weighted constrained context to analysis forest spatial patterns. This work has heavily depended on the rare resource of permanent sample plots as a window into the long-term dynamics of these forest systems. These tools have been applied to conifer and broad-leaf forests, regeneration, growth, mortality, and ecological and wood-quality processes. The tools are designed to help understand the likely consequences of how the climate and human interactions may change the forests of the world.Alark Saxena is an Assistant Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management at School of Forestry in Northern Arizona University. His research is situated at the intersection of complex interactions between human and natural systems. Using livelihood, socio-ecological systems, and complex adaptive systems approach Alark models the coupled and dynamic relationships between forest and people to enable decision-making for sustainability within a rapidly changing world. Alark's current research focuses on the resilience of forest-dependent communities to climate change, dynamic interactions between refugee communities with their environment, the role of forest as a safety net during crises, and wood-based infrastructure as a Nature-Based Solution for increased resilience to earthquakes in urban mountain landscapes. Alark's current research work is spread across South Asia and the Himalayas (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, India), the Caribbean, and Southwest United States.