Forestry Curriculum Team
Todd Ontl | Project Co-PI, Forestry Lead Author
Todd Ontl is the Fellow for the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub with the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science. His work focuses on helping natural resource professionals integrate climate change into forest managementand developing resources and educational materials to both help people adapt natural ecosystems to a changing climate and manage forests for carbon benefits. Todd’s previous work includes an M.S in rangeland restoration ecology, a Ph.D. on soil carbon cycling in agroecosystems, and post-doc research on climate change impacts to carbon fluxes in northern peatlands.
Ivan J. Fernandez | Project Co-PI, Advisory Committee, Forestry Team
Ivan J. Fernandez is Professor in the School of Forest Resources, Climate Change Institute, and School of Food and Agriculture at the University of Maine. He has served on various U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board committees in Washington DC since 2000. He recently chaired and continues to serve on a panel of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) that is evaluating secondary effects of the Clean Air Act. He represents the University of Maine in the USDA Northeast Climate Hub, and has been involved in leading the Maine’s Climate Future assessments in 2009 and 2015. He is a soil scientist, with a research program that focuses on the biogeochemistry of ecosystems in a changing physical and chemical climate and is actively engaged in promoting climate adaptation in Maine.
Richard G. Lathrop Jr. | Forestry Team
Rick is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Natural Resources at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and serves as Director of the Walton Center for Remote Sensing & Spatial Analysis. He is the inaugural holder of the Johnson Family Chair in Water Resources and Watershed Ecology. Dr. Lathrop’s research program works to integrate insights of landscape ecology and geography with the application of geo-spatial information technology to improve our understanding of the structure and function of coupled human-environmental systems. Working with partners, he attempts to translate that understanding into effective and appropriate techniques to improve ‘on-the-ground’ natural resource management and land use planning.
Amanda Mahaffey | Forestry Team
Amanda’s is the Deputy Director of the Forest Stewards Guild, building on seven years serving as the Forest Stewards Guild’s Northeast Region Director. From her base in Maine, Amanda supports the national Women Owning Woodlands network, expands the Foresters for the Birds program begun in Vermont, organizes learning events for the North Atlantic Fire Science Exchange, grows New England’s forest climate adaptation community of practice, and supports Guild members in advancing ecological forestry. Amanda is a licensed forester and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Southern Maine. She has been an active member of the Forest Stewards Guild and the Society of American Foresters since her student days, and is passionate about supporting succeeding generations of forest stewards.
Andrew Whitman | Forestry Team
For almost three decades, Andrew Whitman has worked with partners to apply practical strategies to achieve sustainability. He works with people very different from himself to share and apply strategies for tackling sustainability. This has meant applying a “landscape” view to help partners consider their purpose from a larger scale. It has required working together to simplify knowledge or create new knowledge so that a partner can tackle sustainability more effectively. This includes collaborations with businesses, non-profits, universities, and government in forestry, agriculture, the food industry such as Cabot Creamery, Hancock Natural Resources Group, the States of Maine, Michigan, and Oregon, and universities in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Andres has an MS (UMaine) and a BA (Earlham College) which helps him use science and analytics to solve problems. Family, the outdoors, exercise, reading, and challenges of faith are his life.
Contributors
Thank you to Maria Janowiak, Patricia Leopold, and Leslie Brandt for their expertise, assistance and contributions.