“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” -John Muir
I am a keen enthusiast of trees and the marvelous ecosystems and landscapes they come together and create. My passion is understanding how interactions between physical and biological environments from small to large scales shape these systems.
Using statistical and geospatial methods to integrate spatially explicit longitudinal field data with sensor data, such as land cover and microclimate, I aim to gain insights on the ecological and social impacts of forest disturbances through space and time. By increasing our understanding of how human processes are a part of natural systems and effectively communicating our knowledge, we as scientists can help make decisions that promote the resiliency of ecosystem functions to support humanity on our pale blue dot.
Image Credit:NASA/JPL
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot,” 1994
Whalen Dillon 