Education:

Ph.D. Student, College of Forestry and Conservation, Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences - The University of Montana, Missoula. Degree expected May 2015.

M.A., Geography - University of California, Davis. 2006.
Thesis title: Modeling existing and future vegetation characteristics, wildlife habitat and fire behavior indices in the Kings River project area under three management scenarios.

B.S., Environmental Biology and Management - University of California, Davis. 1998.
Minor in Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Background:

Sean has spent most of his career as a geospatial analyst in support of research activities. He worked for the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, using GIS to answer questions about primate biogeography and the effect of human population density on protected areas. He also worked for the Pacific Southwest Research Station, modeling the effect of management activities on forest characteristics and on the distributions' of California spotted owl and fisher. Sean then moved to Missoula, Montana, where he worked for the LANDFIRE project at the Rocky Mountain Research Station. Sean finally settled at ALWRI; he works with Carol Miller and is investigating the relationship between landscape-scale fire patterns and topography, climate, and vegetation in wilderness areas. He relies heavily on GIS, simulation models, satellite imagery, and multivariate statistics to conduct this work. Sean furthermore dabbles in landscape genetics studies, which associates genetic relatedness among individuals (e.g., wolverines) to landscape structure. Sean is also enrolled in the forestry PhD program at University of Montana.

Selected Publications:

Parks, Sean A., Marc-André Parisien, and Carol Miller. 2012. Spatial bottom-up controls on fire likelihood vary across western North America. Ecosphere 3:art12. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES11-00298.1

Parisien, Marc-Andre.; Parks, Sean A.; Miller, Carol; Krawchuck, Meg A.; Heathcott, Mark; and Max A. Moritz. 2011. Contributions of Ignitions, Fuels, and weather to the burn probability of a boreal landscape. Ecosystems 14:1141-1155.

McKelvey, Kevin S.; Copeland, Jeffrey P.; Schwartz, Michael K.; Littell, Jeremy S.; Aubry, Keith B.; Squires, John R.; Parks, Sean A.; Elsner, Marketa M.; and Guillaume S. Mauger. 2011. Climate change predicted to shift wolverine distributions, connectivity, and dispersal corridors. Ecological Applications 21(8) 2882-2897.

Parks Sean A., Parisien Marc-André, Miller Carol (2011) Multi-scale evaluation of the environmental controls on burn probability in a southern Sierra Nevada landscape. International Journal of Wildland Fire DOI: 10.1071/WF10051, http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=WF10051.pdf

Parisien, Marc-Andre.; Parks, Sean A.; Krawchuck, Meg A.; Flannigan, Mike D.; Bowman, Lynn M.; and Max A. Moritz. 2011. Scale-dependent controls on the area burned in the boreal forest of Canada, 1980-2005. Ecological Applications 21:789-805.

Davis, B.H., Miller, C., & SA Parks. 2010. Retrospective Fire Modeling: Quantifying the Impacts of Fire Suppression. Gen. Tech. Rep. RMRS-GTR-236. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Bigelow, SW & SA Parks. 2010. Predicting altered connectivity of patchy forests under group selection silviculture. Landscape Ecology. 25:435-447.

Manley, PN., Parks, SA., Campbell, LA & MD Schlesinger. 2009. Modeling development as a continuum to address fine-grained heterogeneity in urbanizing landscapes. Landscape and Urban Planning, 89:28-36.

Parks, SA 2006. Modeling existing and future vegetation characteristics, wildlife habitat and fire behavior indices in the Kings River project area under three management scenarios. Master's thesis. University of California, Davis.

Harcourt, AH & SA Parks. 2003. Threatened primate taxa experience higher human densities than do non-threatened: adding a measure of threat to the IUCN Red List criteria. Biological Conservation, 109:137-149.

Parks, SA & AH Harcourt. 2002. Reserve size, local human density and mammalian extinctions in U.S. protected areas. Conservation Biology, 16:800-808.

Harcourt, AH., Parks, SA & R. Woodroffe. 2001. Human density as an influence on species/area relationships: double jeopardy for small African Reserves? Biodiversity and Conservation, 10:1011-1026.

Contact Information:

Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute
790 E. Beckwith Ave.
Missoula, MT 59801
Phone: 406-542-4182
Fax: 406-542-4196
E-mail: sean_parks@fs.fed.us

The Leopold Institute is administered by the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service
and operates under an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service,
U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management,
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service.