Kurt Riitters is a landscape ecologist with EFETAC's Forest Health Monitoring team (FHM) as well as Adjunct Professor of Forestry at North Carolina State University. He joined the U.S. 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 75 peer-reviewed journal articles 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 USFS 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 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. He resides in Chapel Hill, NC, with his wife Betsy Smith and daughter Liza.


Contact Kurt Riitters at kriitters@fs.fed.us or 919-549-4015.