Impact

Forest ecologist Marc Abrams retires from College of Ag Sciences after 35 years

Marc Abrams, retiring professor of forest ecology and physiology and the Nancy and John Steimer Professor of Agricultural Sciences, coring a tree in the Himalayas of northern India to investigate the role of climate change on tree ring growth in the region.  Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology and the Nancy and John Steimer Professor of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State, will retire at the end of June as one of the world’s leading forest ecologists.

Over his 35-year career in the College of Agricultural Sciences, he has published 175 referred journal articles, and the journal PLOS One ranked him as the fifth most cited forest ecologist worldwide.

His most cited research papers include “Fire and the Development of Oak Forests,” published in BioScience in 1992, and “The Demise of Fire and ‘Mesophication’ of Forests in the Eastern United States,” with former graduate student Greg Nowacki, now regional ecologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, also published in BioScience, in 2008.

These papers are considered to be fundamental to the understanding to how oak forests dominated for thousands of years and what factors, including prescribed fire, are needed to sustain these keystone species well into the future.

“Dr. Abrams is one of the most highly cited and influential forest ecologists of our time,” said Brad Cardinale, department head, Ecosystem Science and Management. “His work detailing the role of fire and other disturbances in maintaining healthy forest ecosystems has been a game-changer for management.”

Thanks to Abrams’ research, added Rick Roush, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences, we understand that fire suppression during the Smokey Bear era has had much more influence on tree composition in eastern U.S. forests than climate change.

“Marc has been a powerful voice in recognizing the profound role that Indigenous peoples played in fire and vegetation dynamics, not only in the eastern U.S. but worldwide,” Roush said. “Over his long career, Marc has been responsible for helping to shape the conversation in his discipline.”

Abrams has served on the editorial boards for five top scientific journals, including Ecology and Ecological Monographs, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Tree Physiology, Trees, and Tree Structure and Function. He also has been a member of many National Science Foundation grant panels, participating in NSF-sponsored workshops and the foundation’s Vegetation Classification Committee, which produced a standards manual for best practices in that field.

He received four fellowships to visit Japan — each for two to three months — for teaching and research in forest ecology and tree physiology. He was a distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University in Japan in 2017 and a senior visiting researcher at the Forest Research Institute, Hokkaido Research Organization, in Bibai, Japan, in 2019.

Abrams received the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award presented by The Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers and Scientists, announced at the sixth annual Fire in Eastern Oak Forests Conference. He has given more than 100 invited talks at scientific meetings and seminar series, including over 50 international talks in more than 30 countries. In addition, the College of Agricultural Sciences awarded him the 2002 Alex and Jessie C. Black Award for Excellence in Research.

His biggest joy as a researcher, Abrams said, has come from working with his graduate students at Penn State, most of whom have gone on to have successful careers in forest research and forest management in academia or government agencies.

“In the field of tree-ring science, my students and I discovered new methods for detecting canopy disturbance events from tree-ring records, and through numerous applications of these methods, we were better able to understand the long-term dynamics, fire history and compositional changes in mature and old-growth forests,” he said. “We developed new methodologies for identifying stand dynamics patterns within the tree-ring record.”

Abrams and his graduate students were some of the first researchers to develop methods for differentiating increases in tree-ring growth caused by stand dynamics versus climatic events. When the eminent tree ring scientist Ed Cook included the Nowacki and Abrams radial growth averaging technique into his tree-ring software, this methodology became broadly available to tree-ring researchers around the world and was quickly adopted as the foremost method for detecting canopy disturbances. Dendrochronology methodologies from Abrams’ lab have become integral within forest ecology for understanding forest stand dynamics.

Abrams noted that he is most proud of his 40-year marriage to his wife, Sylvie, and their three sons — Aron, Jason and Dylan — along with their wives and their children.

“My 35 years at Penn State have been a total joy, and I never seriously considered leaving here,” he said. “The campus environment and life in State College, which was a small town when we arrived but not so much anymore, and Happy Valley was as great as we could ever hope for. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. Thank you, Penn State, for giving me a wonderful career and life for me and my family.”

Last Updated June 14, 2022

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