Krista’s postdoctoral research fellowship with the Kobziar Fire Ecology Lab at the University of Idaho investigates airborne eDNA in wildland fire smoke.
Pyroaerobiology = life in smoke
My first postdoc publication traced bacteria in wildland fire smoke back to terrestrial sources for the first time (Bonfantine et al. 2024). We also established the transfer of living microbes from smoke to soil in the laboratory (Ellington et al. 2024). The implications of these findings are discussed in the pyroaerobiology chapter that I coauthored in a new textbook called ‘Biological Highways in the Sky’ (Kobziar et al., 2025).
A highlight of my postdoc has been participating in the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE) that brings fire scientists together from multiple institutions and government agencies to collaboratively measure fire behavior, fuels, smoke, and fire effects on a high-intensity prescribed burn to improve fire and smoke models.