This installment in the Science Distilled series will explore the critical topic of climate resiliency and local solutions. Gain valuable insights into emerging research on cooling the climate and how we can manage forests into the future.

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Featured Presenters:

David Mitchell

Dr. David Mitchell received his Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, USA, in 1995 and has contributed to the peer-reviewed literature in the atmospheric science sub-disciplines of cloud physics, radiation, remote sensing and climate dynamics.  He and his students developed a theory describing the evolution of the North American monsoon that is now widely accepted, and he developed a treatment of ice cloud radiative properties that is currently used in the NCAR climate models.  He and Dr. Anne Garnier developed and published (in 2016) the first satellite remote sensing retrieval for ice particle concentrations and later developed a method providing global percentages of cirrus clouds strongly affected by homogeneous ice nucleation.  He published the first paper on the climate intervention method known as “cirrus cloud thinning” which may produce significant surface cooling at high latitudes. He has given 40 invited talks at universities and research institutes in the USA, the U.K., Germany, Mexico, Norway, France, and Sweden.

Anna Higgins

Anna Higgins is a forester with over twenty years of experience in forestry and wildfire throughout the West. She has a B.S. Forestry from the University of Montana, and a M.S. Forestry from Northern Arizona University. She has worked for the Oregon Department of Forestry, the US Forest Service, and currently the Nevada Division of Forestry. As the Tahoe Environmental Improvement Program Forester, Anna oversees the management of the forests in all NV State Parks inside the Lake Tahoe Basin. She is also a qualified prescribed fire Burn Boss and is very passionate about reintroducing good fire back into our forests.

Anna will present how the forests of Lake Tahoe have changed since Euro-American settlement, what risks the forests are facing in a changing climate, and how land managers and the Washoe tribe of Nevada and California are working to make the forests more resilient.