Reflections Magazine Issue #80 - Spring 2014 | Page 19

Feature Article

Dr. Jeffrey Morisette ’90 has accomplished all those things since graduating
from Siena Heights University. Currently the
director of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s North Central Climate Science Center,
Morisette works with multiple agencies and
organizations to help development long-term
strategies and forecasts for what he believes
is a rapidly changing climate.
“The science behind climate change
is very consistent and very concerning,”
said Morisette, who took over his current
post in Ft. Collins, Colo., in February 2012.
“The climate we’ll be experiencing in the
future may very well be like nothing we have
seen before. So, it’s kind of new territory,
climate change and how this is going to impact fish and wildlife and humans in general.
It’s a brave new world. The science isn’t
trivial, either.”
Morisette works with earth and environmental scientists on a daily basis, traveling
through the region his center serves, which
includes Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and parts
of Montana, including the Yellowstone National Park area. According to the Department of the Interior, the North Central CSC
is part of a network of eight centers created
to provide scientific information, tools and
techniques to use in managing land, water,
wildlife and cultural resources, which are
then used to monitor, anticipate and adapt
to climate change.
“I really enjoy bringing a systems engineering approach to connect this climate
information to the ecological community,”
Morisette said. “There’s a lot of climate scientists and a lot of ecologists. I enjoy being
at the intersection of those two in kind of
a high-tech way.”

Above left: Pictured is the USGS Resource for
Advanced Modeling visualization wall in action,
showing maps of Cheatgrass, an invasive weed
notorious for promoting wildfires in the western
U.S., using three different habitat modeling techniques. This is an example of the technology
Dr. Jeffrey Morisette has access to