Titled an Anthropocene problem (i.e. the human era), as humans have essentially created this area of study (forest resilience in relation to disturbances) due to being too good at preventing disturbances or too good at creating them. Although you can say that is the case with the majority of scientific studies..

Dr. Phil Burton’s lecture topic was essentially defining forest resilience, how it varies amongst various forest types, and what, if anything, we can do to help our forests. I say lecture, as I felt like I was in one of his courses, perhaps Disturbance Ecology, learning definitions for forest resilience and being provided examples of each for the first half an hour or so. Not a bad thing, mind you, as I am no forester or forest ecologist, therefore I learned a fair amount of new terminology! That being said, some of this new terminology can be applied to my project regarding chickadees. For example, mountain chickadees can be considered resilient by being adaptable; adaptable species are flexible and have a certain degree of behavioural or physiological plasticity, genetic diversity or are migratory. Mountain chickadees are slowly coming into urban habitats and actually seem to be doing quite well, making this specialist species rather adaptable. Other than terminology, none of the actual field techniques or methods (which he didn’t delve into) can be applied to my study.

I enjoyed Dr. Burton’s slides and relevant figures that aided his definitions and examples. Also, having examples  from both BC forests and New Zealand forests was neat! Dr. Burton was well equipped to answer any incoming questions, and finished his colloquium off well.