Colin is an ecosystem ecologist with more than twenty years of experience conducting research projects spanning peat bogs to deserts, arctic tundra to tropical rainforests, and satellites to microscopes, but his passion is for restoration ecology in the Southern Rocky Mountains. He grew up in Denver, CO, and attended C.U. Boulder where he earned a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology while working as a research assistant at the Mountain Research Station on Niwot Ridge. There he discovered the joy of conducting technically rigorous science while sitting on a mountain top listening to the wind.
After college, he spent several years working as a research technician across the western U.S. on a range of projects including winter soil ecology at the Toolik Lake Field Station in Arctic Alaska, post-fire restoration in the Great Basin of eastern Nevada, and vegetation patterns of the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program. During this time he also spent two years studying the human and ecological dimensions of resilience and adaptation to rapid ecosystem change at the University of Alaska. Subsequently, he completed a Ph.D. in Ecology in 2013 at the University of Wyoming, focusing on how altered snowpacks affect ecosystem carbon cycles of sagebrush and mountain ecosystems in the Southern Rockies. Since 2013 he has worked as an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska, US Geological Survey, and US Forest Service, and the Mountain Studies Institute, working hand in hand with a broad diversity of land stewards from community groups, local, state, and federal agencies, and Tribes to improve our understanding of and relationships to the ecosystems we inhabit and comprise. His published research can be found here.
Contact Colin at colint@mountainstudies.org.
