Emily J. Silver,^1,*,** James H. Speer,^2,*** Margot Kaye,³ Nicholas J. Reo,^4,**** Lauren F. Howard,^5,***** Alexander K. Anning,^6,****** Samuel W. Wood,^7,******* Henry M. Wilbur<sup>8,********

1</sup>1University of Maine School of Forest Resources 5755 Nutting Hall Maine 04469
²2Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN, 47809
³3Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA, 16802
⁴4Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755
⁵5Arcadia University Glenside, PA, 19038
⁶6Ohio University Athens , OH 45701
⁷7University of Tasmania Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
⁸8University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA, 22904

^*Corresponding author: emily.j.silver@gmail.com; 413-320-2396
^**Emily Silver is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Maine, holding her M.S. in Silviculture from the University of Minnesota. She has taught courses in Field Biology and GIS at Brandeis University and her research ranges from dendrochronology and old growth structure to quantitative approaches to understand the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems.
^***Dr. Speer is a dendrochronologist at Indiana State University with experience in reconstructing environmental variables that affect tree growth, such as insect outbreaks, fire, masting, and climate. He is presently developing tree-ring chronologies in the tropics where previously researchers had thought that annual rings did not form. He has developed the first insect outbreak reconstructions on pandora moth, a frequent defoliator of western pine forests and he has developed new methods that enable dendrochronologists to use tree rings to reconstruct past fruiting in oak trees. He has received five NSF grants and many other federal grants to fund his work.
^****Dr. Nicholas J. Reo works with American Indian Tribes in the U.S. and other Native peoples on applied research concerning the management and use of natural resources. Nick explores the application, preservation, and outcomes of traditional resource management systems that are embodiments of tribal traditional ecological knowledge. He also studies the political interactions that occur between tribes and their neighbors surrounding natural resource issues, including cross-boundary cooperation and co-management of ecosystems and subsistence resources.
^*****Lauren Howard is an Assistant Professor of Plant Biology at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. His scholarly interests include forest succession and disturbance, and his research explores the historic role of fire in shaping today's forest communities and the effects of contemporary controlled burning in the central Appalachian Mountains.
^******Alex Anning is a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University holding a M. Phil. in Biological Sciences from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana. Alex has several research interests in plant ecology including tropical forest/biodiversity conservation, forest structure and human disturbances, exotic plant invasions, phytoremediation, and dendrochronology. His current research, however, focuses on the effects of prescribed fire and thinning treatments on forest productivity and carbon sequestration in the mixed oak forest of the Central Appalachians.
^*******Dr. Wood is a post doctoral fellow at the University of Tasmania interested in combining historical data with spatial data to untangle the complex interactions between fire, vegetation, and soils that shape Australian vegetation communities. He is particularly interested in establishing long-term monitoring systems and developing dendro-ecological techniques to better understand past fire regimes.
^********Dr. Wilbur is a professor emeritus from the University of Virginia. His research focuses on population and community ecology from an evolutionary perspective. He spends his summers at the Mountain Lake Biological Station, a facility of the University of Virginia, supervising REU students and conducting his own research.