Clarke’s doctoral research links basic tenets of forest carbon ecology to some of California’s most pressing environmental legislative goals. California is leading the international debate about the best way to manage forests to store carbon and mitigate climate change. Sustaining the State’s forests as reliable carbon sinks requires an understanding of the baseline carbon carrying capacity. The overarching goal of Clarke’s research is to understand the impacts of disturbance on forest carbon cycling and to develop a baseline of forest conditions for a high-priority landscape – Six Rivers National Forest in the Klamath Mountains. As a historical ecologist, she uses paleo-ecological data from fossil pollen records in lake sediments, witness tree data from public land surveys (conducted in the 1880s), and spatial interpolations from contemporary forest inventories to document long-term biomass trends in California. Clarke’s goal is to inform our understanding of the structure and function of forests before fire suppression and provide an opportunity to reassess assumptions about long-term forest carbon storage.