Dr. Victoria Donovan
Assistant Professor, Forest Management
School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences
Dr. Victoria Donovan has a 60% teaching and 40% research appointment in the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatic Sciences. Dr. Donovan teaches courses supporting the Natural Resource Conservation (NRC) undergraduate teaching program at the WFREC. Her research program centers around fire and landscape ecology with a focus on understanding how disturbance processes enhance or degrade ecosystem resilience and how this information can be integrated into ecosystem management.
Programs
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Research
Ecological resilience is the amount of disturbance that a system can absorb before shifting to an alternative ecological regime with its own distinct structures, functions, and feedbacks. The Donovan Lab is interested in understanding how disturbance processes like fire can promote or degrade ecosystem resilience across a range of scales and how this information can be used to support social-ecological systems management. Our research spans numerous ecosystems from southeastern US forests to Great Plains savannas. We combine remotely sensed data with field research to answer quantitative questions that link ecological theory to application in order to promote sustainable ecosystem conservation, restoration, and management. Much of the Donovan Lab’s research focuses on fire ecology, however, we are interested in a range of disturbance processes, outcomes, and interactions across scales.
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Teaching
Dr. Donovan teaches or co-teaches 5 courses to support the Undergraduate NRC degree program at WFREC. These include: Fire Ecology, GIS, Forest Mensuration, Natural Resource Sampling, and Foundations of Natural Resource Conservation
Contact
Milton Rm. 4918
UF/IFAS West Florida Research and Education Center
5988 Hwy. 90, Bldg. 4900
Milton, FL 32583
850-983-7137
victoria.donovan@ufl.edu
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Education
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B.S., Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada (2012)
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M.S., Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (2015)
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Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA (2019)
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- Publications