Cedar Welsh

Forest Ecologist
Silverwood Consulting, Terrace, BC 

Research on Impacts of Climate Variability on Forests

Cedar Welsh is a forest ecologist whose main research area focuses on the impacts of natural disturbances and climate variability on forest dynamics. She has a B.Sc. (biology) from Trent University and a M.Sc. (forest ecology) from the University of Northern British Columbia. She is an enrolled member of the Association of Professional Biologists of British Columbia. Cedar has worked as a researcher for university, government, and industry. Currently she is an Ecologist for a consulting firm in Terrace, BC where she continues her interest in forest ecology and climate change research.

Cedar’s master’s research evaluated the temporal and spatial outbreak dynamics of Dothistroma needle blight in lodgepole pine-dominated forests of northwest BC. Her research findings suggest that the recent emergence of Dothistroma is linked to short-term climate change. Comparisons between local climate records and tree-ring reconstructed Dothistroma outbreaks indicated that increases in disease severity coincided with increases in precipitation levels, most notable during the current outbreak when summer precipitation increased to previously unrecorded levels over the last ~100 years. Other recent research emphasized the importance of climate change, in the form of increased summer precipitation, on the current outbreak. The results of her study highlight the unpredictable nature of climate change on forest ecosystems and the need to quantify the effects of climate variability on disease occurrence to allow better predictions of future impacts of climate change on forest health. 

Contact:
(250) 635-0766
cedar@silverwoodconsulting.ca