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Jonathan Henn has quickly become an eminent plant ecologist with work on alpine plant communities and grassland wildfires. He reflects on his research journey so far.

Jonathan Henn

This fall, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation and Dean of the Institutes Massimo Ruzzene namedÌýINSTAAR’s Jonathan Henn ²¹²ÔÌýOutstanding Postdoc of the year. The award recognizes only two postdoctoral scholars from the entire ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ system each year. Henn was chosen for his excellence in research productivity, innovation, communication, leadership, and advocacy for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

During his postdoc, Henn is working with INSTAAR faculty fellowÌýKatharine Suding to characterize long-term change in alpine plant communities and study fire regimes in grasslands. Though he is an early-career scientist, he has published 26 peer-reviewed papers and secured over $700,000 in research funding. Several of his recent papers have been cited over 100 times.

As Henn’s time as a postdoc nears its end, INSTAARÌýsat down with the hard-working young scientist to reflect on his research journey.

Did you always want to be an ecologist? How did you find your way to studying plant communities?

I'm from Minnesota and my family had a lake cabin up in northern Wisconsin. As a kid, I spent a lot of time out in the woods just running around finding cool plants. Going into college, I already thought biology was really cool. At first I thought birds were my thing. But then, for my first summer internship, I did restoration monitoring in natural areas around campus. It hooked me, and it all just went from there.

It's an awesome job, I think, because you get paid to go to all kinds of really interesting places and just try to figure out what's going on. Hopefully your work leads to a better understanding of these natural systems. And, if you better understand how things are happening, you might be able to manage and restore ecosystems in a way that can preserve nature.

You’ve published a ton of work during your time at INSTAAR. What is a highlight?

that represents a large part of my postdoctoral work. We found that things are changing in a really wide variety of ways.

The difficult thing that a lot of researchers have encountered is that alpine plants live for a long time and are relatively slow to respond to things. That's one of the really awesome things about theÌý. We have really long term datasets that can start to capture these slow responses.

Subalpine meadow, Colorado.

It’s still messy — different plant species are responding in different ways. But one way that we can cut through that variation is by thinking about characteristics of plants that might relate to the way that they grow, survive, and experience their environment. You can sort of characterize plants as having more of a live fast, die young strategy where they grow really fast and don't live as long. Other plants have a more conservative, slow-growing strategy, and these species are very common in Alpine and Arctic environments.

When you start to split it up like that, you start to see patterns. It seems that the live fast, die young plants are having more success under global change conditions. On the other hand, the really stress tolerant, slower growing plant species are tending to decline through time.

What are you most proud of during your time as postdoctoral scholar with INSTAAR?

I've worked with a really wide variety of people and a wide variety of projects, and that's been really satisfying. It all stems from my involvement with Niwot Ridge. There's so many awesome people doing really cool things.

Recently I've been really involved in thisÌý. People from the Boulder city and county governments came to my advisor, Katie Suding, after the Marshall fire. They were under a lot of pressure to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. They were looking for a way to manage the grasslands in a way that could reduce wildfire risk. Katie realized that we don't really know anything about the efficacy of different management strategies and what sort of side effects they might have.

It’s a unique project because it came from this specific question and need that managers had. We wrote a proposal, got a grant funded, and that’s been my focus for the last year-and-a-half or so. Now we’re getting a big project off the ground that's super collaborative. We’re integrating folks in Boulder as well as Louisville and Superior and Longmont. It’s been a really interesting experience doing research that's management focused and has, hopefully, very actionable outcomes.ÌýÌý

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If you have questions about this story, or would like to reach out to INSTAAR for further comment, you can contact Senior Communications Specialist Gabe Allen at gabriel.allen@colorado.edu.

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