Richard Vachula, PhD
Short Bio
Dr. Richard Vachula is an interdisciplinary scientist focusing on the complex relationships between climate, fire, humans, and ecosystems. Additionally, Dr. Vachula has a particular interest in fire as an Earth System and socio-environmental process. At Auburn, Dr. Vachula leads an interdisciplinary, collaborative research group composed of hardworking and creative students. He teaches courses through the Interdisciplinary Earth System Science (ESS) PhD program (e.g., ESS and Global Change, ESS Seminar) and the Department of Geosciences (e.g., Paleoclimatology, Dynamic Earth).
Education
BS in Geology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015
BA in French Studies University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015
ScM in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Brown University 2017
PhD in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Brown University 2020
Professional Experience
In 2020, Dr. Vachula served as a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. In August 2020, he joined the Environmental Science and Policy program at the College of William and Mary as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. He has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Auburn University since January 2022.
Innovation
Dr. Vachula's research group uses the techniques of paleoclimatology and paleoecology, environmental science, organic geochemistry, geography, and geoarchaeology to disentangle the interactions between climate, fire, ecology, and humans. Fire's complexity, in addition to its multi-factorial controls and impacts, means that our research is not confined within a single disciplinary silo. Rather, Dr. Vachula's work spans these disciplines by integrating what are typically discrete methodologies of paleoclimate and paleoecology, geospatial analysis, sedimentology, modelling, meta-analysis, and organic geochemistry. Although Dr. Vachula's work has often relied on the use of paleoenvironmental records of fire history (e.g., by-products of fire preserved in geologic deposits such as lake, peat, or marine sediments; a.k.a. "paleofire records"), it has increasingly shifted to focus on modern timescales using more varied methodologies, as well as deep time contexts (e.g., millions of years). The following list of research themes that have prevailed as long-term foci of Dr. Vachula's research:
- Undertaking experimental burns to inform paleofire interpretations
- Informing fire management and policy by disentangling the relative influence of climate change and human management as controls of fire in North American ecosystems
- Constraining the timing and environmental impact of human arrival to the Americas using paleofire reconstructions
- Using paleofire records to benchmark fire parameterizations in Earth System and climate models
- Developing more robust techniques to track the impacts of "industrial fire" (e.g., coal fired power plants) in the environment
- Examining social conceptualizations of the environment and how they influence our views of it
- Developing new proxies to better reconstruct fire-climate and fire-human relationships
- Comparing modern geospatial fire data to paleofire proxy data to better inform paleofire interpretations and our ability to distinguish human and climate driven fire
- Providing environmental context for the abnormality of modern fire activity ('natural' and human caused)
