Jacob Levine

I am advertising a postdoctoral position in my new lab at Duke, to start as early as August 2026. If you are interested in how plant communities respond to climate change, please consider applying!

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30614

Private land used for logging is more prone to severe fire than public lands. A new study shows why New research explains why forests planted for logging purposes fuel devastating wildfires more often than untouched land.

A new study led by alum @jacoblevine.bsky.social, BS '18 Forestry and EEP, and co-authored by Professor Scott Stephens and research scientist Brandon Collins explores why forests planted for logging purposes fuel devastating wildfires more often than untouched land. www.latimes.com/environment/...

It’s in our paper that just came out. See figure 4, positive interaction between tree height and HDW index causes sign to flip. Like I said, I’d want to understand it more, but this is just about the most detailed data we’ve ever had on these dynamics so I’d be surprised if it’s a total artifact

My hope is that this research can help us better balance the goals of providing a sustainable source of timber and reducing fire risk.

Fire is ultimately a contagious process. That means we need broad cooperation across ownerships to get on top of it. Logging is a part of the solution!

The real issue for me is that logging=bad ignores all the nuance. Sure, some logging is bad for fire, but other types of logging are critical for reducing severity. The timber industry has a clear fire problem (so does USFS, just a slightly smaller one), it also provides enormous value.

We also find that while big trees reduce the prob. of high-severity fire in mild weather conditions, they become a liability in extreme ones, increasing fire severity. I would want to understand that result more before basing policy on it, but nevertheless it suggests some complications.

Its complicated. We show conclusively that the increased risk of high-severity fire in industrial forests is the result of plantation-type structures, too many trees spaced too regularly. This suggests thinning (i.e. logging) and rx fire are needed across both private and public land.

@latimes.com

Private land used for logging is more prone to severe fire than public lands. A new study shows why New research explains why forests planted for logging purposes fuel devastating wildfires more often than untouched land.

Great to see our work in my hometown paper!

Its not logging itself thats the issue, its what happens after -- dense plantations are responsible for elevated fire severity in industrial forests.

Excellent story by @nohaggerty.bsky.social.

www.latimes.com/environment/...

Megafires more likely to occur on private land than public forests, study finds More than 44,000 fires have burned nearly 4 million acres across the U.S. so far in 2025, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, but only a handful have been megafires. A new study found t...

Had a great time chatting with Jericka Duncan on @cbsnews.com.web.brid.gy last night about our new study on increased fire severity in industrial forest plantations.

You can watch it here!
www.cbsnews.com/video/megafi...

Industry managed forests more likely to fuel megafires, study finds The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more l...

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🔥 Want to know why megafires are growing bigger? A new study shows industrial private forests are 1.5× more likely to burn in high-severity wildfires than public forests. Mismanaged fuel beds help fires spread.

Does logging reduce wildfire danger? New California study finds key exception Private timberlands in Northern California are more likely to see high-severity wildfire than areas in and around public forests, a new study found.

Industrial logging is not the kind of selective thinning that lowers the risk of intense wildfires

www.sfchronicle.com/california-w...

The open-access paper, not linked in the news coverage, is here
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Excited to see our work on 🔥 in industrial forests featured in the @sfchronicle.com this morning.

Article by @kurtisalexander.bsky.social:

www.sfchronicle.com/california-w...

Hopefully, this research will help us strike a better balance between the sustainable production of critical wood products and the mitigation of fire severity risk in plantations.

Mitigating the severity of future fires requires a coordinated effort across ownership boundaries. In particular, strategies like mechanical thinning which reduce the density of trees and foster structural variability are critical.

Overall, the paper suggests that the forest structures created through plantation forestry -- dense, homogenous stands with high ladder fuels -- elevate the risk of high-severity fire. However, although public lands fared better in our dataset, they still have a massive fire severity problem.

This is an important result because it indicates that management practices which reduce tree density and ladder fuels, and increase variability, will remain effective even as extreme weather conditions become more prevalent under climate change. Indeed, these efforts will only become more urgent.

Critically, we also found that the effects of forest structure on fire severity were amplified in extreme weather conditions!

We found that fires were more severe in dense, spatially homogenous forests with high ladder fuels – characteristics more common on private industrial than adjacent public land.

Using this data, we examined: (i) which forest structures are most associated with high-severity fire; (ii) whether these forest structures are more common on private industrial land; and (iii) how extreme fire weather driven by climate change mediates the effect of management.

Using a unique airborne LiDAR dataset, we identified and mapped individual trees across 460,000 hectares in the Sierra Nevada, an area which subsequently burned in five large wildfires including the Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in California’s recorded history.

Brandon Collins, Michelle Coppoletta, Scott Stephens and I have been working for the past three years to understand a consistent, puzzling pattern in wildfire data: that fires are more severe on land owned by industrial timber companies than on land managed by public agencies.

Extreme Weather Magnifies the Effects of Forest Structure on Wildfire, Driving Increased Severity in Industrial Forests Wildfires are consistently more severe in private industrial forests than public ones. In this paper, we identify the drivers of this pattern. Namely, we show that fire severity is elevated in dense,...

🔥🔥🔥 Why are wildfires more severe in private industrial forests?

Our new paper in @globalchangebio.bsky.social has the answers:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🧵 Thread below

levine-ecology.com/index.php/jo...

Thrilled to announce that next year I will be joining @DukeBiology as an assistant professor!

I am excited to recruit postdocs and PhD students to start as early as Fall 2026. If you are interested in plant community dynamics, global change, and/or wildfire, please see details below.

Competition for time: Evidence for an overlooked, diversity‐maintaining competitive mechanism In ecology, there is an underappreciated but fundamental distinction between systems in which the depletion of limiting resources reduces the growth rates of competitors and systems in which resource...

This work is in many ways an extension of our work on "competition for time" in annual plant communities, which you can read about here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The model we develop therefore explains the amazing diversity of plant hydraulic traits observed in plant communities across the globe, and replicates patterns across precipitation gradients.

Specifically, variation in species' drought tolerance generates an emergent phenological division of the time between storms. When paired with a trade off such that drought intolerant species grow faster or are more fecund, there is no limit to the number of species that coexist.

By unifying ecophysiology and community ecology theory, we show that simple trade-offs can maintain a high diversity of plant hydraulic traits across a wide array of climates and plant types.

Trait diversity in plant communities maintained by competition for water and light Ecological communities frequently exhibit remarkable taxonomic and trait diversity, and this diversity is consistently shown to regulate ecosystem function and resilience. However, ecologists lack a ...

Excited to share our new paper out now in Ecological Monographs!

"Trait diversity in plant communities maintained by competition for water and light"

@ecologicalsociety.bsky.social
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....