Boreal forest ecosystem forecasts
With Eliot McIntire’s group at the Pacific Forestry Centre, we built integrated simulation models of forest vegetation dynamics, fire, insect disturbance, and wildlife populations to inform management decisions. This work produced climate-sensitive forecasts of habitat and populations for boreal caribou and landbirds in the Northwest Territories.
Dr. Chubaty is an ecologist and simulation modeller who builds spatial models of forest landscapes and the species that live in them. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University modelling host selection in mountain pine beetle (MPB), followed by postdoctoral research at Université Laval and Natural Resources Canada developing forecasting models of MPB spread.
He runs FOR-CAST Research & Analytics in Calgary, Canada. His recent work
includes LANDIS-II forest landscape simulation studies, landscape
connectivity modelling, and analyses of insect outbreak dynamics, to inform
land management and species-at-risk decisions. He writes open-source R
packages for this work, including grainscape for connectivity analysis,
landisutils for LANDIS-II simulations, and co-developed the SpaDES
simulation platform. He advocates for open data and reproducible workflows.