Valerie received a Udall Center Fellowship, which gives her a course-release for Spring 2018.  Yay!
more info on the Udall Center's webpage

Embroidery artist Bonnie Peterson made a beautiful piece based on our Belmecheri et al. (2016) Sierra Nevada SWE reconstruction that is currently part of an exposition at Yosemite National Park Museum. 

Qichao Yao published the first paper from his PhD in GRL.  In this paper, Qichao presents the first tree-ring based fire history for northeast China that goes back to 1774 and uses it to investigate climatic influences on past wildfire regimes.  A photo of a fire-scarred sample from Qichao's study was also selected as the cover of this GRL issue.  Cool stuff!

Ross Alexander successfully defended his PhD dissertation on Friday March 3.  Ross’s dissertation is entitled “Determining the role of stand structure in shaping climate-growth relationships in eastern temperate forests of the US”. Congratulations, Ross!

The Trouet Lab will have a busy week at the AGU Fall meeting.  Here's a chronological overview of our presentations and sessions:
Monday 12/12:
8am-12.20pm poster: B11D-0489: B11D-0489 Latitudinal Gradients in Tree Ring Stable Carbon and Oxygen Isotopes Reveal Differential Climate Influences of the North American Monsoon System. (Paul Szejner et al.) Moscone South Poster Hall
8am-12.20pm poster: B11D-0497: B11D-0497 Validating the Spring Jet Stream Indices Using Extended Spring Index (SI-x) Models (Amy Hudson et al.) Moscone South Poster Hall
4.40pm: oral presentation: B14C-03 Stand structure and composition provide differential tree-ring growth signals in eastern U.S. forests (Ross Alexander et al.) Moscone West 2004
Tuesday 12/13:
8am-12.20pm: session B21B Constraining Ecosystem Carbon Uptake and Long-Term Storage using Models and Data I Posters  (David Moore and Valerie Trouet) Moscone South Poster Hall
4-6pm: session B24A Constraining Ecosystem Carbon Uptake and Long-Term Storage using Models and Data II oral session (David Moore and Valerie Trouet) Moscone West 2004
Thursday 12/15:
5.15pm: GC44B-06 Socio-ecological transitions trigger fire regime shifts and modulate fire-climate interactions in the Sierra Nevada, CA, 1600-2015 CE (Valerie Trouet et al.) Moscone West 3001

Our study about the impact of land-use changes - such as the mission establishment, the Gold Rush, and Smokey the Bear - on past wildfire regimes in the Sierra Nevada in California was published in PNAS today.  This was the result of a collaboration with Alan Taylor (PSU), Carl Skinner, and Scott Stephens.  The work was funded by the Joint Fire Science Program and the USGS Southwest Climate Science Center, amongst others.  UANews wrote a press release about it.

Amy has been selected as a 2017 UA Carson Scholar.  Congratulations Amy!

Valerie gave a talk on November 4 - the day that the Paris Climate Agreement entered into force - at the Kavli Frontiers in Science Symposium at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. She talked in the 'Causes and Consequences of Climate and Weather Extremes' session.  A link to her talk will be posted here as soon as it's available.

Qichao Yao will be spending a semester of his PhD in our lab.  Qichao studies historical fire-climate interactions in NE China and is visiting from the Northeast Forestry University in China.
Welcome Qichao!