Postdoctoral Position in Forest Fire Ecology and Global

The Department of Geography, at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (WFFRC) seeks to hire a qualified candidate for a postdoctoral research position focused on the fire ecology and California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and the broader western United States.

We seek a highly motivated Postdoctoral Scholar to work at the interface of fire ecology, forest dynamics, and ecosystem modeling as part of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (WFFRC; https://(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).) based in the Trugman Lab at UC Santa Barbara. The postdoc will lead efforts to parameterize and apply the individual-based forest landscape model iLand to develop scalable ecological inferences on fire–vegetation interactions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the broader western United States.

The successful candidate will work closely with an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, modelers, and Earth system scientists to integrate field observations, remote sensing products, and existing datasets into a mechanistic modeling framework. The position offers substantial intellectual independence and opportunities to publish high-impact research addressing forest resilience, disturbance regimes, and climate change.

The appointee may work on one or multiple additional ongoing lab projects, depending upon interests and past experience; opportunities also exist to collaborate with mathematical modelers, remote sensing projects, and field scientists across California ecosystems and the broader western United States.