2024 IAWF Scholarship Recipients
We are pleased to share the 2024 scholarships recipients
Marie Claire Aravena Acuña
Ph.D. student in the Doctoral Program of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences,
National University of La Plata (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, UNLP), Argentina.
Marie Claire studied for a bachelor’s degree in Forestry Science and Nature Conservation, and later earned her qualification as a Forestry Engineer from the University of Chile in 2019. After graduation, she worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Silviculture and Nature Conservation at the University of Chile, where she participated in various GIS and fieldwork projects, relating to fire, drought and anthropogenic impacts in central Chile.
She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the School of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences at the National University of La Plata. She was awarded a scholarship from the Argentine government, enabling her to relocate to Argentine Patagonia and conduct her research at the Austral Center of Scientific Research (CADIC) of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Ushuaia. There, she is collecting field data, performing laboratory work, and conducting statistical analyses to investigate the effects of wildfires on Sphagnum peatlands in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Her research aims to assess changes in the functional ecology of wildfire-damaged peatlands and their role as carbon sinks. This work is fundamental to understanding the impacts of wildfire on local forests and peatlands, which is necessary for their conservation and restoration.
Marie Claire’s specialties and interests include fire ecology, remote sensing, and spatial analysis using GIS and Google Earth Engine (GEE) tools. She is also committed to ecological conservation and communicating of scientific knowledge to the community.
Marie Claire is grateful to the international wildfire community, through the IAWF, for supporting her research work on Patagonian peatlands and forests.
Harrison Raine, MSc Student
Masters of City Planning, Masters of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley
Harrison began his wildfire research and work as a Forestry Technician for the US Forest Service in 2016. Since then, he spent six fire seasons with the USFS, graduated from Colorado College with a B.A. in Organismal Biology and Ecology, and conducted an international Thomas J Watson Fellowship focused on the socio-ecological balance of wildfires. Currently a dual masters student at UC Berkeley in City Planning and Landscape Architecture, Harrison’s research focuses on the “urban” side of the wildland-urban interface. His thesis work explores wildfire risk within mobile home parks, a critical form of affordable housing in the American West with elevated physical and social vulnerability to wildfire loss. This work identifies that homes in mobile home parks experience disproportionate rates of wildfire loss compared to other housing types in California’s recent wildfire seasons. He is grateful to IAWF for their support in this work. Beyond school, Harrison intends to work on projects that improve wildfire resiliency within the wildland-urban interface.