Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy

• Fire regimes of the central Appalachians
• Central Appalachian silviculture
• Fire as a silvicultural tool
• Historical records as ecological data
• Red spruce recovery and restoration

Melissa's research includes stand- and landscape-level projects at both long- and short-term time scales. Most of this work is focused on the restoration and sustainable management of forested ecosystems in the eastern United States. Successful restoration of an ecological system requires that a series of important questions be addressed: 1) what are the restoration goals, 2) what techniques or actions will meet these goals, and 3) how is success measured. Restoration includes reestablishing patterns, processes, and species often in the context of a given space and time frame. To establish and accomplish ecological restoration goals, land managers need information about historical conditions.

As with any forest management, managers need to know what actions accomplish the goals of restoring patterns and processes and need to be able to predict the results of those actions. To help answer these questions, Melissa's work includes stand-level studies involving prescribed fire, browse control, and a variety of silvicultural practices. Some of these studies are long-term studies started on the Fernow Experimental Forest to answer more traditional growth and yield questions but also can be used to provide information on long-term stand dynamics.

Red spruce-dominated ecosystems are considered critically imperiled in the central and southern Appalachians. These generally high-elevation sites are the focus of restoration efforts by federal, state, and private land managers. These forests are considered to be in recovery from the exploitative harvests of the past, but they are slow to recover and are now subject to current threats from climate change, nonnative invasive insects, large deer populations, and changes in land use. To explore the efficacy of active management for restoration at a landscape-scale, spatial models are used to track forest development under different management scenarios. The resulting modeled forest conditions can be compared to either stated restoration goals or investigated for support of assumptions and goals of management.

To address the lack of knowledge about European settlement-era forests in the central Appalachian region, Melissa has developed a GIS-based dataset of witness trees from the Monongahela National Forest. With this dataset, land managers and researchers can discern the relationships of pre-settlement forest composition with environmental variables, compare past species composition to the present, and provide a model that will guide ecosystem restoration efforts in mixed-oak and high-elevation red spruce forests in the Appalachians. This work has expanded to include witness trees on the Allegheny, Finger Lakes, Green Mountain, and White Mountain National Forests, township-level data for New England, and the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As more data are uncovered or made digital, this work may be expanded further into Ohio and Virginia.

As a research forester assigned to NRS-01, Melissa is involved in on-going, long-term silvicultural and forest management research. This long-term research involves developing silvicultural systems for sustaining forest products, wildlife benefits, species diversity, and for restoring forest ecosystems. This research specifically relates to forest management, in particular studying the many silvicultural tools available to sustainably manage forests for a variety of outcomes. Such guidelines and models are sought after by federal, state, and private land managers. Current studies include artificial regeneration; precommercial thinning; crop-tree release; prescribed fire; herbicide use; and even-aged, two-age, and uneven-aged management.