Charlie Truettner

The Forest Innovation Platform was built by a community of more than 200 scientists, land managers, practitioners, developers, and partners working together to rethink how forest data can support real-world decisions. The platform brings climate, forest condition, disturbance, and resilience information together in an open-source framework designed to help users explore different drivers of forest vulnerability for the contiguous USA for both historical and projected data. This talk will share the story of how that community came together to build the platform, the lessons learned along the way, and a broader vision for making forest science more accessible, collaborative, and actionable in a rapidly changing climate.

Speaker Biography

Charlie Truettner – Director of Climate Science, American Forests

Charlie Truettner is Director of Climate Science at American Forests, where he leads research and applied science focused on wildfire, forest resilience, climate adaptation, and reforestation. His work integrates climate and ecological data with decision-support tools to help land managers anticipate changing forest conditions and prioritize management actions. His broader research interests include forest transitions at the desert–forest interface, dendrochronology, stable isotope geochemistry, ecohydrology, and wildfire–carbon dynamics in the boreal forests of Interior Alaska, with a focus on understanding how forests respond to drought, climate variability, and disturbance. He collaborates with researchers and practitioners across the western United States on climate-informed reforestation, wildfire resilience, and applied forest science. 

Recommended Reading

Anderegg, W. R. L., Chegwidden, O. S., Badgley, G., Trugman, A. T., Cullenward, D., Abatzoglou, J. T., Hicke, J. A., Freeman, J., & Hamman, J. J. (2022). Future climate risks from stress, insects and fire across US forests. Ecology Letters, 25(6), 1510–1520. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14018