Professor of Landscape Ecology
Department of Forest Management, W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation
University of Montana
I am a landscape ecologist and study the biogeography of forests. I spend time thinking about how climate, topography, fire, and management shape how forests establish, persist, and decline. Most of my work is in the mountains of western North America, where a few hundred meters of elevation or a different slope facet can determine whether a burned hillside remains forested or converts to an entirely different ecosystem.
Scale and variability is a through-line across two decades of research in my lab. Gridded climate data often hide the terrain and local-scale variation that organisms experience — the cold-air pool, the north-facing slope, the shade from the canopy above. My lab builds datasets and models that make the variation visible. Then we ask where are forests resilient, where are they at their limit, and where will investments in restoration pay off in the decades to come?
I’m also the Program Director for Forestry at FCFC, and serve as the UM consortium lead for the USGS Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. Outside the university I am the Chief Scientist at Viridian Ecosystems and a science advisor for Blue Forest Conservation. I work directly with federal agencies and NGOs on forest management and conservation problems.
I received a B.S. in Resource Management from UC Berkeley, and an M.S. in Horticulture and a Ph.D. in Ecology from UC Davis.
Climate varies continuously across all scales. We quantify how physiography and tree cover shape the energy and water balance, how forest canopies buffer climate extremes, and how climate change affects organisms where they live.
We model fire probability and severity across the western US, quantify how these have changed from historical fire regimes, and aim to understand how changing fire patterns affect forest regeneration and demography.
We use spatial climate analogs and connectivity modeling to ask whether species can keep pace with moving climates, and whether protected-area networks and public-land strategies make sense under climate change. We give planners defensible spatial priorities to work with.
Tree establishment is a demographic bottleneck. We use field data, ecohydrological and plant-hydraulic models, and post-fire inventories to identify the climate thresholds beyond which seedlings cannot survive, and to explain the recruitment pulses that let regeneration succeed in some years and not others.
Reforestation need in the West is outpacing the supply chain and planting capacity available to meet it. We quantify that gap, map where planting is most likely to succeed under current and future climate, and build prioritization tools that agencies and partners can actually deploy.
It takes a village: gridded climate and water-balance products, downscaled climate data, and decision-support tools designed so that people outside the lab can apply them.
Selected from roughly 100 peer-reviewed papers. Each title links to the published article.
The complete, continuously updated list lives on Solomon Dobrowski’s Google Scholar profile.
Maps plausible vegetation types under a +2 °C future across the western US and how vulnerable each location is to transformation. Draw an area, upload a shapefile, or pick a management unit to generate figures, reports, and raster downloads.
Built on the climate analog models described by Hoecker et al. 2026.
Search any location and see where its future climate exists today. It answers what a +2 °C or +4 °C world will look and feel like where you live.
I wrote about why a tool like this matters.
High-resolution climatic water balance for the western US: TerraClimate downscaled from 4 km to 240 m, so that the topographic variation organisms actually experience is resolved rather than averaged away.
A decision support framework for prioritizing planting projects within burned areas across the western US.
Writing for general audiences, plus interviews and coverage across print, radio, and broadcast.
Works at the intersection of computational ecology, global change biology, and conservation biogeography, developing modeling tools to understand how forested and agricultural landscapes adapt to climate change.
Graduate researcher working on regeneration and reforestation outcomes in western forests.
Works on post-fire reforestation planning, spatial optimization, and decision support tool development.
Wildfire analyst and quantitative ecologist.
Courses in the Department of Forest Management, and graduate training in quantitative ecology.
I take graduate students through the W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation. Students that excel in my lab tend to arrive with strong writing skills, an appetite for quantitative approaches, comfort with R or Python, interest in spatial analysis, and a keen interest in forests and wild places.
Before you write me, review two or three recent papers from the lab and tell me which questions you are interested in digging into. That is more useful than a general statement of interest. Include a CV, a short description of your background, and why you are interested in working in the lab.