Contact Information
NSF Earth Science Postdoctoral FellowYale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Email: jennmarlon at gmail.com
Web: jennmarlon.info
Education
2009 Ph.D., Geography, University of Oregon2003 M.S., Geography, University of Oregon
1991 B.S., University at Albany, State University of New York
Interests
Biography
I'm an NSF Earth Science postdoc at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; I was formerly a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have expertise in paleoecology, paleoclimatology, wildfire, and meta-analysis. Most of my research involves the use of sediment records from lakes, bogs, soils and the ocean to reconstruct past environmental changes. I am particularly interested in human impacts on the environment during the Holocene (the past ~12,000 years). I enjoy paleo research because of the insights it allows into slow processes (e.g., vegetation succession, soil development) and extreme events (e.g., wildfires, droughts, volcanic eruptions) that are hard to understand without very long records of environmental change.I have a strong interest in climate change education. Prior to my NSF fellowship, I was a postdoc for the Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research (DISCCRS, and since then I have begun work with the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication to study climate change literacy among the public.
I finished my PhD in Geography at the University of Oregon in December, 2009. My dissertation "The Geography of Fire: A Paleoecogy Perspective" evolved into an international effort to compile charcoal datasets from around the world, which is now called the Global Palaeofire Working Group.
Fire in the News
The National - March 10, 2012 Australians at odds over how to control wildfires
The Contemplative Mammoth (guest blog post) - February 28, 2012 Fire in the American West: A long-term perspective
NYT - October 21, 2011 Are dead trees more combustible than lives ones?
NYT - October 1, 2011 The Forest for the Trees: In Arizona, trees are cut down to save forests from massive fires and to combat climate change.
The White Mountain Independent - July 11, 2011 Millions of Excess Trees Add Fuel to Catastrophic Wildfires
Scientific American - June, 2011 Climate Change Increases Threat of Fire to U.S. West Global warming could scorch the western U.S.
BBC - 10 May 2011 Megafires - a vicious climate circle?