Welcome!

I am an Assistant Research Professor for the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. My research interests cover a range of topics including forest-disturbance ecology, forest demography, human-environmental interactions, and archaeology. Much of my research seeks to understand how humans and climate change have affected forest resilience and how these lessons can be applied to management decisions. I am also active in developing new tools and resources for tree-ring scientists to improve field sampling, analytical methods, and data visualization.

Interests

  • Forest disturbance ecology
  • Human-environmental interactions
  • Vegetation type conversion & alternative stable states in forest and shrubland communities
  • Dendrochronology

Education

  • PhD in Natural Resource Studies, 2016

    University of Arizona

  • MS in Forestry (Silviculture), 2009

    University of Maine, Orono

  • BA (with honors) in Geology, 2005

    Bates College

Projects

Synthesizing historical surface fire regimes across North America

Dendrochronology of Culturally-Modified Trees on the Navajo Nation

Integrated watershed hazard assessment for wildfire, floods, and debris flows in the Navajo Nation

Historical pyrodiversity in the SW US

burnr: An R package for tree-ring fire history

dfoliatR: An R package for analyzing insect defoliation signals in tree rings.

Recent Publications

Dating the origins of persistent oak shrubfields in northern New Mexico using soil charcoal and dendrochronology

Megafires in dry conifer forests of the Southwest US are driving transitions to alternative vegetative states, including extensive …
Chris Roos, Chris Guiterman
PDF DOI

Comparing tree-ring based reconstructions of snowpack variability at different scales for the Navajo Nation

Snowpack in the western U.S. is on the decline, largely attributed to increasing temperatures in the region. This is a critical issue …
Rebecca Brice, Chris Guiterman, Connie Woodhouse, Carlee McClellan, Paul Sheppard
PDF DOI

Native American fire management at an ancient wildland–urban interface in the Southwest United States

The intersection of expanding human development and wildland landscapes—the “wildland–urban interface” or WUI—is one of the most vexing …
Christopher Roos, Thomas Swetnam, T. J. Ferguson, Matthew Liebmann, Rachel Loehman, John Welch, Ellis Margolis, Chris Guiterman, William Hockaday, Michael Aiuvalasit, Jenna Battillo, Joshua Farella, Chris Guiterman
PDF DOI

dfoliatR: An R package for detection and analysis of insect defoliation signals in tree rings

We present a new R package to provide dendroecologists with tools to infer, quantify, analyze, and visualize growth suppression events …
Chris Guiterman, Ann Lynch, Jodi Axelson
PDF Code DOI

A history of recurrent, low-severity fire without fire exclusion in southeastern pine savannas, USA

The reintroduction and maintenance of historical surface fire regimes are primary goals of ecological restoration across many open, …
Monica Rother, Jean Huffman, Chris Guiterman, Kevin Robertson, Neil Jones
PDF DOI
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