Biography of Kurt Riitters
Kurt Riitters is a research ecologist located in Research Triangle Park, NC, as well as Adjunct Professor of Forestry at North Carolina State University. He joined the USDA Forest Service Forest Health Monitoring Program in 2000 after fifteen years of research in quantitative forest ecology, monitoring, and assessment with three Federal Agencies and in forest industry. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and numerous other publications, and has received awards for pioneering research in landscape ecology. His current research focus is on national- to global-scale assessments of landscape patterns from remotely sensed land-cover maps, and his work has appeared in many environmental reports including the Millennium Assessment, the Official Atlas of the United States, and the State of the Nation’s Ecosystems. He is the USDA Forest Service national leader of landscape pattern and forest fragmentation research for the Resource Planning Act (RPA) and Montreal Process assessments. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Landscape Ecology and is co-director of the Center for Landscape Pattern Analysis. He is past President of the United States Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology, and past Deputy Chairman for North America for the Landscape Ecology Working Group of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations. He received his B.E.S. (Elected Studies, 1976) and M.F. (Forest Management, 1978) degrees from the University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. in Forest Science (Silviculture, 1986) from Oregon State University.
Learn more about Kurt Riitters' work:
Forest health monitoring, analysis, and assessment
Modeling and mapping landscape pattern resilience and vulnerability
View Kurt Riitters' Eastern Threat Center publications. View all his publications and additional information from Google Scholar.
Contact Kurt Riitters at kurt.h.riitters@usda.gov or 919-549-4015.
