Graduate Student (MS)

• email (Edwin.Roworth@arnold.af.mil)

Edwin Roworth earned his MS from the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts in 2001, where he examined the historic range of variation in landscape structure on the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado. He received his BS from the Department of ???? at Rutkers University in ????. He is currently a conservation GIS manager at ????.

Edwin's MS research in the Landscape Ecology Lab focused on helping to develop the RMLands landscape disturbance-succession model. Under the paradigm of ecosystem management, there is widespread recognition of the need to better understand the interplay between process and pattern in ecosystems and landscapes. There is growing interest in understanding how these processes and patterns change ecosystems and landscapes over time, and whether human activities have caused ecosystems or landscapes to move outside their expected range of variation. To establish the expected range of variation under a natural disturbance regime, we developed the spatially explicit dynamic landscape simulation model RMLands.

Edwin applied an early version of this simulation model to a representative area of high-elevation forests in Southwestern Colorado on the Pagosa District of the San Juan National Forest. The purpose of the simulations was:

1. To quantify the expected range of variation in landscape structure under the current climate disturbance regime, as representative of pre-settlement conditions;
2. To characterize the relationship between landscape extent and the expected range of variation in landscape structure; and
3. To determine the sensitivity in landscape structure dynamics to variation of fire frequency, size, and rotation period.

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Kevin McGarigal
Department of Environmental Conservation
University of Massachusetts
304 Holdsworth Natural Resources Center
Box 34210, Amherst, MA 01003
Fax: (413) 545-4358; Phone: (413) 577-0655
Email: mcgarigalk@eco.umass.edu