Fire ecologist to speak at task force meeting

December 4, 2006
Summit County, CO Colorado

FRISCO - Tania Schoennagel, one if the authors from Colorado State University, the University of Colorado and the University of Idaho of a recently-released research study on insect outbreaks and fire risk, will be the featured speaker at the next mountain pine beetle task force breakfast meeting on Thursday, Dec. 7 at Frisco's Best Western Lake Dillon Lodge.

Dr. Schoennagel is a fire ecologist who received a Masters in conservation biology and a PhD in ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied postfire succession in the eastside Cascades and Yellowstone National Park. Between these degrees, she also worked briefly for the Forest Service Fire Sciences Research Lab in Missoula, Montana. Currently, she holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she has focused on climate-fire relationships in the Rockies as well as current forest management and policy issues. She has received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, a DOE Graduate Research Environmental Fellowship, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioinformatics.

Dr. Schoennagel will deliver a presentation on key aspects of the "Recent Forest Insect Outbreaks & Fire Risks in Colorado Forests" study and comment upon the extensive media coverage it has been receiving.

Dr. Schoennagel's resume is available online at:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~schoenna/images/TScoennagelCV.pdf.