Jon Wang (he/him)

@jonwang.bsky.social

1162 Followers 1731 Following

Queer, Asian-American ecologist interested in global change. Wildfires, carbon, and land cover with remote sensing and machine learning. Leads the Dynamic Carbon and Ecosystems lab (www.dycelab.net) at the University of Utah.

Two maps of California, with varying shades of green indicating the amount of tree cover in each area. Burned areas indicated in orange for the first decade, 1986-1996, on the left and the last decade, 2011-2021, on the right. Fires are present, but modest in area, on the left. Fires are much larger in extent on the right, particularly in the northern forests.
Line graph showing time on the x axis: year, 1985-2021 and cumulative tree loss in fire on the y axis. Lines and show the cumulative tree loss in modeling scenarios from 1985-2021 based on several scenarios. Black lines show the observed losses, reaching about 13,000 kilometers squared. The purple line represents a model scenario where fire severity is held constant, and it reaches about 10,000 kilometers squared. The red line shows the scenario where forest exposure is held constant, reaching about 8500 kilometers squared. The blue line shows the scenario where fire severity and forest exposure are held constant, and only burned area increases. It ends around 7500 kilometers squared.
Graph showing summer temperature on the x-axis and precipitation on the y-axis. Each climate bin is colored with the average tree cover (grey to green, 0 to 80%) occupying that part of climate space in California. Black points indicate the location in climate space of fires in the first decade. Blue indicates the same for the middle decade, and red for the last. Large points show the decadal average. The large blue and black points in are clustered around 20 degrees C and 750 mm precipitation. The large red point (last decade) is located at about 18 degrees C and 850 mm precipitation.
Four panels. First panel: line graph with red line showing increasing burned area, black line showing increasing tree cover loss from 1985-2021. Second panel: Average forest exposure (as points) and standard deviation (as lines) increasing steadily from 1985-2021. Third Panel: Average fire severity and standard deviation (again, points and lines) increasing steadily over 1985-2021. Fourth panel: the average and standard deviation of the combined effect of forest exposure and fire severity (tree cover loss), again as points and lines, showing steady increases from 1985-2021.