My goal is to understand the impacts of disturbance on forest carbon cycling and to develop a baseline of forest conditions for Six Rivers National Forest, a high-priority landscape. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that under the pre-settlement fire regime of frequent fire, the mixed conifer forests in the Klamath Mountains, stored less carbon in live tree biomass than under the current altered fire regime. By integrating paleo and modern data, I will quantify a long-term record (1000+ years) of the interactions between the fire regime and biomass storage in the mixed conifer forest.

Knight CA, Cogbill CV, Potts MD, Wanket JA, Battles JJ (2020) Settlement-era forest structure and composition in the Klamath Mountains: Reconstructing a historical baseline. Ecosphere 11:e03250.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.3250

Knight CA, Baskaran M, Bunting MJ, Champagne C, Potts MD, Wahl DA, Wanket JA, Battles JJ (2021) Linking modern pollen accumulation rates to biomass: Quantitative vegetation reconstruction in the western Klamath Mountains. The Holocene. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683620988038.

Knight, C.A., L. Anderson, M. J. Bunting, M. Champagne, R. M. Clayburn, J. N. Crawford, A. Klimaszewski-Patterson, E. E. Knapp, F. K. Lake, S.A. Mensing, D. Wahl, J. Wanket, A. Watts-Tobin, M. D. Potts, J. J. Battles. 2022. Land management explains major trends in forest structure and composition over the past 3000 years in California’s Klamath Mountains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 199: e2116264119.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2116264119

Press release for Knight et al. 2022
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/03/14/how-indigenous-burning-shaped-the-klamaths-forests-for-a-millennia/

Contact Information

John Battles
jbattles@berkeley.edu
510-643-0684

Clarke Knight
cknight@usgs.gov
650-329-4540
https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/clarke-knight

CAL FIRE Forest Health Research Program
FHResearch@fire.ca.gov