Graduate Research Assistant

As a graduate research assistant in the Donovan Lab, I ran the geospatial analysis behind my master’s thesis: how large wildfires in the eastern United States relate to the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and what’s driving the pattern. The core finding — WUI fires burn more often, bigger, and earlier in the year than fires outside it, even as most of the recent growth in fire activity is happening outside the WUI — was published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire and shaped a public tool I built from the same data, the WUI Wildfire Explorer.

• Built a spatial database of large wildfires (>200 ha) across the eastern U.S. from 1986–2021, joined to the USFS WUI layer, as a reproducible R pipeline.
• Modeled wildfire WUI status, distance to the WUI, and proportion of WUI area burned against weather, fuel, ignition, and suppression variables at national and ecoregion scales.
• Found WUI wildfires made up 45% of large fires and 55% of area burned, ran 46% larger on average, and were becoming more frequent in spring — while most growth in fire activity was happening outside the WUI, not inside it.
• Presented the work at four venues, including the International Association for Landscape Ecology and the Ecological Society of America, and published it in the International Journal of Wildland Fire (Weidig et al. 2024).