Sari graduated from the School of Resource & Environmental Management in 1993. Her masters project was entitled "Relationships between Wildlife Richness and Characteristics of Protected Areas in British Columbia".
Sari is currently a Research Assistasnt Professor through Michigan Technological University , and primarily does research for the North Central Research Station of the USDA Forest Service. Physically, she actually resides in Juneau, AK, and can watch the bears wandering on the avalanche chute outside her office window.
Sari works within the interagency Great Lakes Assessment, a Regional effort that has two roles: assembling spatial data on ecological and socioeconomic factors within the northern Great Lakes Region, and analyzing trends in these variables to provide information on sustainability of land management practices. Most recently, the Assessment has been studying historic and current patterns of land cover, factors influencing modern fire regimes, and landscape structure induced by roads and management.
Sari's research interests fall within three general categories: the multiscale nature of ecosystems: the impacts of human versus natural disturbances on community and ecosystem characteristics; and the implications of the above for conservation and planning of protected areas. Particularly, she is interested in the concordance of patterns of structural, functional, and composition features across landscapes, the interrelationships of these patterns across scales, and the implications of these associations for understanding inherent and induced edge effects.
Outside of official research, Sari is trying to take advantage of the spectacular landscape of Alaska and the community of Juneau. She is busy birding with the Juneau Audubon Society, helping with local bird and invertebrate surveys, and doing as much hiking and camping as one can with two small children and passels of bears. MRM alumnae always have a place to stay if they want to come to Juneau to fish, hike, or just sit and wonder at the glacier.
Representative Publications- Saunders, S.C., M.R. Mislivets, D.T. Cleland, J. Chen, and K.D. Brosofske. Fire distribution in administrative, ecological, and climatic units of the northern Great Lake Region, USA. Environmental Management, in review.
- Saunders, SC, J. Chen, T.D. Drummer, T.R. Crow, K.D. Brosofske, and E.J. Gustafson. 2002. The patch mosaic and ecological decomposition across spatial scales in a managed landscape of northern Wisconsin, USA. Basic and Applied Ecology 3: 49-64.
- Saunders, SC, M.R. Mislivets, J. Chen, and DT Cleland. 2002. Effects of roads on landscape structure within nested ecological units of the Northern Great Lakes Region, USA. Biological Conservation 103: 209-225.
- Saunders, SC, J. Chen, T.D. Drummer, and T.R. Crow. 1999. Modeling temperature gradients across edges over time in a managed landscape. Forest Ecology and Management 117: 17-31.
- Chen, J., SC Saunders, T.R. Crow, K.D. Brosofske, G.D. Mroz, R.J. Naiman, B.L. Brookshire, and J.F. Franklin. 1999. Microclimate in forest ecosystem and landscape ecology. Bioscience 49: 288-297.
- Saunders, SC, J. Chen, T.R. Crow, and K.D. Brosofske. 1998. Hierarchical relationships between landscape structure and temperature in a managed forest landscape. Landscape Ecology 13: 381-395.