Who She Is
Terrie Jain grew up camping and fishing in the forests of northern New Mexico. When she wanted to study forestry, she left the state for the University of Idaho, because New Mexico's universities did not offer forestry programs at the time. There she earned a Ph.D. in silviculture, the science of growing and tending forests, and landscape ecology, in a program with few women and even fewer Hispanic students. She spent more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service, planting trees, running prescribed burns, and doing field research, sometimes in wildland firefighting gear. Her research asked hard questions: does thinning a crowded forest make a wildfire burn less severely, and why did some young planted forests survive the 2015 wildfires in the northern Rocky Mountains while others did not? In 2007, she became the first Hispanic American, and the second woman, to receive the National Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Silviculture. Now retired, she is an emeritus scientist with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Why She Matters
When a wildfire is coming, or a burned hillside needs replanting, foresters have to make decisions that cannot be undone. Jain's work gave the people making those calls evidence to rely on, from how thinning changes fire behavior to which replanted areas are most likely to survive. Those are the same questions foresters face as wildfire becomes a bigger part of the job. She has described her job as providing the essential research that land managers need. Her findings on thinning, burn severity, and replanted forests are published in the Forest Service's research library, where today's foresters can read and use them.
