Rate My Professor Solomon Dobrowski

Solomon Dobrowski is Professor of Forest Landscape Ecology and Director of the Forestry Program in the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana, where he has held his current position since 2007. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Resource Management from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, a Master of Science in Horticulture from the University of California, Davis in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis in 2005. Dobrowski's research centers on the linkages among climate, topography, fire, and vegetation in forests of western North America. His projects examine tree regeneration dynamics in burned and unburned western U.S. forests under varying climate conditions, model plant hydraulic failure and its effects on low-elevation tree recruitment, test species distribution model projections using historical datasets, quantify terrain's role in biota's adaptive response to climate change, analyze past, current, and future fire regimes influenced by anthropogenic, climatic, and biotic factors, and study forest carbon resource transformations due to management and wildfire. He addresses resource management challenges relevant to federal agencies and NGOs, with a focus on climate change impacts.

Dobrowski teaches graduate-level courses including FOR 538 Modern Applied Statistical Modeling in Ecology and FOR 595 Landscape Ecology, as well as undergraduate FOR 202 Forest Measurements and the summer field course BIO 451 Landscape Ecology of the Northern Rockies. He serves on the Leadership Team of the USGS Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and acts as a science advisor for Mast Reforestation and Blue Forest Conservation. His influential publications include 'TerraClimate, a high-resolution global dataset of monthly climate and climatic water balance from 1958–2015' (2018), 'A climatic basis for microrefugia: the influence of terrain on climate' (2011), 'Changes in climatic water balance drive downhill shifts in plant species’ optimum elevations' (2011), 'Wildfire-driven forest conversion in western North American landscapes' (2020), and 'Wildfires and climate change push low-elevation forests across a critical climate threshold for tree regeneration' (2019). These works have collectively amassed over 14,000 citations, underscoring his impact in landscape ecology and climate adaptation research.