Women in Ecology – Nayani Ilangakoon

In this latest Women in Ecology interview, we spoke with Dr. Nayani Ilangakoon, a research scientist at the University of Colorado - Boulder (CU Boulder) who received her Ph.D. from Boise State University. Ilangakoon is focused on the impact of wildfires on ecosystems, and pairs her childhood experiences in nature with remote sensing data from NEON to conduct her research.

Below, Ilangakoon discusses her career path and motivations, mentors in the field, as well as challenges that need to be addressed at a global scale in order to change public awareness surrounding wildfires.

Can you tell us about your career path and what inspired you to become involved in your current research and field?

I think I should go back to my childhood. I grew up in Sri Lanka – a tropical island – and my village had paddy fields. In a tropical country with paddy fields, we only get two seasons (monsoons) and depend on the rain to cultivate the fields. We have to work with nature all the time to know when the rain is coming; we would have to be ready. My father taught me how to prepare the land. Irrigation is a huge component of paddy fields, and my father knew how much water to keep or remove. He told me what plants should be in the field and which of them would work well. Everything from my childhood I learned from him.

When I went to college in Sri Lanka, I majored in Geology, and I got to travel to places not open to the public. For instance, we visited mines to see how minerals like graphite were extracted, and we studied different mineral deposits. Traveling to all these different places allowed me to see how nature and humans work together.

During my high studies (Masters) in the U.S., I shortly learned that this area of the world has more than the two seasons I was used to when growing up. I had seen lots of fires when I lived in Sri Lanka, but I had never thought fire was this prominent in the U.S. I did my master's studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and while Ohio doesn't have many wildfires, the population is still affected by them due to the air quality. That was when I first witnessed the impact of wildfires on human life.

I then moved to Idaho for my Ph.D. at Boise State University. We had some research sites, and one of them was destroyed by the Soda Fire in 2015. That wildfire burned over 280,000 acres, and we lost a good portion of our research plots. My work involved using remote sensing data from the NEON Airborne Observation Platform. With these data, we can see what happens before, during, and after a fire. I realized that I could use this to understand how ecosystems change from fire to fire. My Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Nancy Glenn, was a huge inspiration to me. She exposed me to cutting-edge data sources from NASA – such as Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) – to see how fire changes ecosystem structure, composition, and diversity.

Nayani at the Overland fire field site in Colorado holding a drone. Photo credit: Tyler McIntosh

What keeps you motivated in your ongoing studies and dedication to this field?

One thing is meeting people who study the fires. Dr. Jennifer Balch at CU Boulder is a pioneer in wildfire research, and she ties in different aspects of wildfires (e.g., air quality, human impact, policy changes, fire regime shifts, recovery, and restoration) to her work. There are so many pieces that we need to connect to each other and the data. Being able to collaborate and work together with people who work in different areas is what keeps me motivated.

How has NEON impacted your research on fires?

Hayman Fire (2002) as seen in 2022 in the Colorado Front Range. Once a forest full of trees, the area is now a shrub and grassland with dead trees. Photo credit: Nayani Ilangakoon

NEON helped me a lot because it collects hyperspectral, lidar, and RGB images from airborne platforms as well as data about soil and vegetation which is all free and open to use. NEON also covers many different eco-regions across the U.S., which helps to understand how they respond to different disturbances. The biggest challenge is that there are mountains of data, and not every facility has the capacity to process these massive datasets. I have to reach out to different high-performance and cloud-computing resources because I have this big, valuable dataset from NEON; luckily, there are many resources to work on the data to better understand the environments around us.

What's the most fun part of being an ecologist?

Being able to be outside and see myself as part of nature. I can see how my work engages with nature when I'm in the field. I like being able to go to a lot of different places, climb mountains, work with people, and feel like I'm a part of this.

Can you expand on your current research studying forest wildfire recovery and its relationship to atmospheric carbon levels?

I work with Dr. Balch; my research mostly involves forest wildfire recovery. If a wildfire happens, that means burning trees and soils, which leads to the release of stored carbon in those trees and soils to the atmosphere. My research focuses on the recovery process afterward.

I address three different things. One is the recovery trajectory, which means how long it would take an ecosystem to recover to the pre-fire state. This can be controlled by many factors, including the climate; topography, elevation, slope and aspect of the burned ground and its surrounding environment; and the pre-vegetation type and density. My work focuses on the American West because it experiences frequent fires due to its dry and warm climate. We look to see if the recovery happens in the same way across ecoregions and how long it will take to recover.

The second thing I study is ecosystem transformation. Some ecosystems recover to their pre-disturbed state, but most don't. The fires can change the ecosystems into different ones, such as a forest to a grassland. I look at the change that an ecosystem goes through after a fire and examine why that happens. I try to find when and where that happens and recognize those areas before the transformation occurs.

The third thing I address is biodiversity. There has been a lot of biodiversity lost due to climate change and vegetation invasion, and this is especially the case after a disturbance. We have to first recognize whether there's been a biodiversity change. That's what my team and I do by using the remote sensing datasets with the help of NEON to understand the connection and impact of disturbance on biodiversity change.

Nayani and her team in the field at the Cal-Wood Education Center outside Boulder, CO. Photo credit: Nayani Ilangakoon

What challenges have you faced in the field of STEM? 

The challenging part is the data. We have a ton of data, but using them to understand ecosystem processes is really difficult. Ecosystems are complex and interconnected, and sometimes finding all the data to understand one process is hard. We want to make assumptions, and those can lead to the need for approximations. For example, when studying the impact of fires on the carbon cycle, we may have abundant data on aboveground vegetation and climate conditions, but insufficient data on belowground carbon changes. The carbon cycle involves interactions among the atmosphere plus the aboveground and belowground components.

The other challenge is data collection. Field work is seasonal in the U.S., so in my case it only happens during the summer. We must plan everything during that limited time frame which isn't easy. There's a question of where and what we have access to and what datasets we can get. Again, being an ecologist comes with the need to have multidisciplinary knowledge. You need statistical knowledge, remote-sensing knowledge, ecological knowledge, and computer science knowledge, all very different topics that are challenging. So, its critically important to be collaborative too.

A final challenge is addressing underrepresented groups and how we can bring them into ecology. I just saw a statistic that shows only 28% of the STEM workforce is women. So that tells me as a woman that I need to empower women at a young age and teach them about our work to bring them into the STEM field. We have fewer role models in the field, so that means we must bring more in.

Are you confident that the scientific community will be able to solve the world's biggest ecological issues? What barriers do you think need to be removed in order to do so?

I recognize two main challenges that need to be addressed. The first is the loss of biodiversity and the other one is climate change. Both happen on a global scale, so addressing them requires global collaboration. It's hard because they come with political issues, policy-changing issues, and the concern of public awareness. These three need to be addressed while we address the other issues that the ecological community knows: biodiversity loss, air pollution, forest degradation, climate change. However, the number of people who are working on and are aware of these issues is very small compared to the greater public and policymakers. And then there's the economic factors. Some issues come with countries with high poverty levels. They have huge economic factors that they cannot navigate, but their contribution to solving these issues is important. Those are things that I feel we have to address to reduce the political boundaries and change public awareness. Overall, to do all of this, we need to empower people and improve public knowledge.