Margot Kaye

Margot Kaye serves as Interim Department Head and Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Pennsylvania State University. She earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1993, M.S. from the University of Arizona in 1997, and Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 2002. Kaye's research specializations include vegetation dynamics, global change ecology, interactions among vegetation, climate, and human land use, dendrochronology, disturbance history, and environmental change. Her areas of expertise encompass global change ecology, forest ecology, dendrochronology, and community ecology. She maintains affiliations with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Penn State.

Kaye's research examines northeastern forest regeneration and responses to global change through field-based climate manipulation experiments in Penn State's Stone Valley Forest, simulating approximately 2°C warming and 20% increased precipitation to monitor tree seedling growth, phenology, ecophysiology, community composition, and soil processes. Additional projects address impacts of non-native invasive shrubs on eastern hardwood forest structure, phenology, and dynamics; climate-driven woodland expansion in the central Great Plains using paleoecological records; and drivers of forest change in regions like the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She has published extensively, with key works including "Critical zone perspectives for managing changing forests" (Kopp et al., 2023, Forest Ecology and Management), "Opportunities for prescribed fire implementation in the Mid-Atlantic, United States" (Wu et al., 2022, Journal of Environmental Management), "Drivers of forest change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" (Blomdahl et al., 2022, Journal of Vegetation Science), "The seasonal influence of invasive shrubs on light and temperature in an eastern deciduous forest understory" (Maynard-Bean and Kaye, 2021, Natural Areas Journal), "Drought timing and local climate determine the sensitivity of eastern temperate forests to drought" (D'Orangeville et al., 2018, Global Change Biology), and "Advancing dendrochronological studies of fire in the United States" (Harley et al., 2018, Fire). Kaye teaches FOR 203: Field Dendrology, FOR 320: Forest Fire Management and Ecology, and FOR 597: Introduction to Tree-Ring Methods, contributing to education in forest dynamics and environmental management.