John J. Battles

John J. Battles is a Professor of Forest Ecology and the Rudy Grah Endowed Chair of Forestry and Sustainability at UC Berkeley. He is a field scientist engaged in long-term research of temperate forest ecosystems. His goal is to understand how and why forests change. Towards this end, his research seeks to understand the dynamic response of forest communities to disturbances and perturbations such as air pollution, invasive species, forest management, extreme drought, and fire. His recent work has focused on understanding the interactions among disturbances to assess their potential to reshape forests. The challenges of documenting these impacts have spurred an emerging effort to leverage the incredible investments of place-based forest inventory and monitoring. The goals are to gain big insights from these “small data” and to ensure that they provide empirically robust, AI-ready benchmarks that support the next generation of forest research.