Profile of Monica G. Turner

In October 1988, ecologist Monica Turner rode in a helicopter over Yellowstone National Park and glimpsed the aftermath of unprecedented destruction. Earlier that summer, a severe drought triggered the largest fires the region had seen in two centuries, and by the time the fires abated, over one-third of the park had been consumed by the flames. As Turner flew overhead, looking at the charred, and in some places still smoldering, landscape, she did not see desolation and death. Instead, she saw transition and rebirth.

The Yellowstone fires gave Turner, the Eugene P. Odum Professor of Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Madison, WI), a grand opportunity. A few years earlier, Turner had joined a nascent scientific movement termed landscape ecology, a subdiscipline of ecology and geography examining the large-scale relationships among the land, its resources, and the organisms that inhabit it. Turner was particularly interested in the dynamics of heterogeneous landscapes, such as what causes spatial patterning and how it is important ecologically, and the fires at Yellowstone presented a natural experiment unfolding before her eyes.

“I was expecting that the fire damage would be uniform,” says Turner. “Instead, I could see this rich mosaic of burnt and unburnt patches next to each other. These were exactly the types of patterns that I could generate with computer models.” Turner has made frequent return visits since 1988, and much of her research has examined the numerous players involved in the fire recovery process. These factors include growth and competition among reestablishing plants, the movement and foraging patterns of elk, and whole-system carbon dynamics. “As a landscape for study, Yellowstone has just been phenomenal,” says Turner, “and I think that our work over the years has shown how well adapted the landscape is to these major fires. They are not ecological catastrophes …