Carissa Wonkka

Assistant Professor

Dr. Wonkka's research focuses on identifying process-based restoration options for degraded ecosystems via studies that:

• Restore ecological processes, including disturbance regimes, to woody encroached and weed-invaded ecosystems and explore the impacts on multiple ecosystem components, including plant community traits, plant growth and physiology, plant-soil feedbacks, fire behavior-fuel feedbacks, and plant-insect interactions
• Quantify restored community resilience to climatic change stressors and novel disturbance regimes
• Link social and regulatory barriers to resultant restoration outcomes.

Her research applies wide ranges of variation in disturbances such as drought, fire, herbivory, and other stressors in a dose-response framework to go beyond treating disturbance as binary processes and instead incorporate variability in disturbance regime components into research. It also seeks to re-couple processes (i.e., fire and grazing) decoupled by modern management and identify the scale necessary for effective restoration. She also studies social, ecological, and regulatory barriers to effective ecosystem management to understand feedbacks between anthropogenic and ecological systems. 

Courses Taught

• Education
  • Ph.D., Ecosystem Science & Management, Texas A&M University (2014)   
  • M.S., Rangeland Ecology & Management, Texas A&M University (2010)
  • J.D., Land Use & Environmental Policy, Suffolk Law School (2008)         
  • B.S., Wildlife Conservation & Management, University of Massachusetts (2003)    
• Publications

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