Research Interests

I am a biogeographer interested in understanding present and past responses of Earth’s biota to climate change. The overarching theme of my research is the influence of climate change and climate-mediated natural disturbances on the composition and structure of forests, at several scales in space and time. My specific interest lies in reconstructing forest composition and natural disturbances over recent history (hundreds of years) and more distant history (thousands of years) using interdisciplinary research designs. For example, sediment records extending back to the last Ice Age (18,000 years ago) or earlier allows us to address how populations and communities reorganize through periods of fast and slow climate change. Shorter sediment records of only the past 2000 years provide context for human-induced impacts of the last 200 years. And tree-ring records of the past 400 years can be used to address tree population dynamics at annual resolution. While most of my graduate training was in sediment-based paleoecology, I have subsequently branched into other subfields of biogeography.

Selected publications

Gavin, D.G., J.E. Kusler, and B.P. Finney. Millennial-scale decline in coho salmon abundance since the middle Holocene in a coastal Oregon watershed. Quaternary Research. In press.

Herring, E.M., D.G. Gavin, M. Fernandez, and F.S. Hu. 2018. Ecological history of a long-lived conifer in a disjunct population. Journal of Ecology 106: 319-332. doi:10.1111/1365-2745.12826

Schwörer, C., D.G. Gavin, I.R. Walker, and F.S. Hu. 2016. Holocene treeline changes in the Canadian Cordillera are controlled by climate and local topography. Journal of Biogeography 44:1148-1159. doi:10.1111/jbi.12904

Gavin, D.G., and L.B. Brubaker. 2015. Late Pleistocene and Holocene Environmental Change on the Olympic Peninsula. Ecological Studies Vol. 222. Springer. 144 p.

Gavin, D.G., M.C. Fitzpatrick, P.F. Gugger, K.D. Heath, F. Rodríguez-Sánchez, S.Z. Dobrowski, A. Hampe, F.S. Hu, M.B. Ashcroft, P.J. Bartlein, J.L. Blois, B. C. Carstens, E.B. Davis, G. de Lafontaine, M.E. Edwards, M. Fernandez, P.D. Henne, E.M. Herring, Z.A. Holden, W. Kong, J. Liu, D. Magri, N.J. Matzke, M.S. McGlone, F. Saltré, A.L. Stigall, Y.-H.E. Tsai, and J.W. Williams. 2014. Climate refugia: joint inference from fossil records, species distribution models and phylogeography. New Phytologist 204:37–54.

McLauchlan, K , P. E. Higuera, D.G. Gavin, S. S. Perakis, M. C. Mack, and 19 others. 2014. Reconstructing disturbances and their biogeochemical consequences over multiple timescales. BioScience 64:105–116.

Teaching