Hunter Stanke

PhD Student

Michigan State University

Biography

I am an applied forest ecologist, data science consultant, and Graduate Research Fellow in the Forest Geospatial Lab at Michigan State University.

My research and consulting interests are generally structured around the integration of field studies, “big data”, and advanced statistics to solve pressing issues in forest management and ecology. My current work involves quantifying forest structural restoration needs in the Pacific Northwest, specifically detecting and attributing multidecadal changes in the “ecological departure” of forest landscapes in the region. I am also leading efforts to advance understanding of the consequences of disturbance, climate, and management legacies on temperate forest demography and biomass dynamics across multiple scales.

I am the lead author and maintainer of rFIA, an R package designed to increase the accessibility and use of the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Database. Check out our website for more information, tutorials, and documentation on rFIA. You can also find us on CRAN and GitHub, and in a recent article in Environmental Modeling and Software. For bug reports or feature requests, please see our active issues page.

Interests

Disturbance & Landscape Ecology
Forest Management & Decision Science
Quantitative Silviculture
Conservation Finance & Impact Investing

Education

PhD Forestry

Michigan State Univeristy
PhD Environmental and Forest Science

Univeristy of Washington
MS Forestry, 2020

Michigan State Univeristy
BS Forestry, 2019

Michigan State University

Featured Publications

Hunter Stanke, Andrew O Finley, Grant M Domke, Aaron S Weed, David M Macfarlane

January 2021 Nature Communications

Over half of western United States' most abundant tree species in decline

The nature of forest disturbances are changing, yet consequences for forest dynamics remain uncertain. Using a new index, Stanke et al. show the populations of over half of the most abundant tree species in the western US have declined in the last two decades, with grim implications for how temperate forests globally will respond to sustained anthropogenic and natural stress.

PDF Code DOI

Consulting Services

I help firms leverage data (big and small) and analytics to improve their decision making processes. Many of my clients come from the forest products industry and natural climate solutions space, and I particularly enjoy drawing on my background in forestry to design solutions to environmental and resource management problems.

My services include, but are not limited to:

R programming (scripting, package development, automation)
Statistical modeling and ML model development
Forest inventory/ biometrics
Data management
Technical writing and editing
Data visualization

As the lead author and maintainer of the rFIA R package, I have developed unique expertise and familiarity with the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Database. The FIA Database is among the richest ecological datasets in the world, with primary applications in forest health monitoring, carbon accounting, remote sensing, and broad-scale timber product monitoring. Despite being publicly available, complexity in database structure, data coding, and sampling design make the FIA Database extremely difficult to access - even for experienced users.

Contact me to see how I can help!