I’m Audrey Hyke, a PhD student exploring how ecological processes evolve across landscapes and through time. My master’s work combined satellite-derived forest data and high-level Bayesian statistical modeling to estimate forest area in the Pacific Northwest, highlighting the need for rigorous uncertainty quantification in forest inventories and carbon markets. This led me to the McLachlan Lab at Notre Dame, where I am using 10,000 years of paleoecological records along with genetic data to model how forest populations moved, mixed, and transformed throughout the Upper Midwest. My overall goal with my work is to develop models that bridge long-term ecological data with modern observations to better understand and predict vegetation responses to environmental change, all within a robust statistical framework.