Kurt Menning

Office

Biography

Kurt Menning began his university education in physics and and was selected to be a satellite controller for the University of Colorado’s Solar Mesosphere Explorer, the first university-operated satellite in the world. During his undergraduate studies, his focus extended to include natural resource conservation. He served as director of the University of Colorado Wilderness Study Group. Next, he completed a master's degree at the University of Montana examining management in a national park and biosphere reserve in Russia. He was the first American visiting scholar to the Russian Institute for Research in Mountain Forestry and Forest Ecology. 

After completing his masters degree Kurt took time to census sea lions and puffins on the coast of Alaska for Kenai Fjords National Park. Upon arriving in California, he became a contributing author to the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP)—a broad survey of environmental conditions and policies in that mountain range. 

In 2003, Kurt completed his doctoral degree at the University of California. In his research, he combined his interests in conservation biology and physics by using remote imagery and an extensive array of field data (covering over 100 km2) to examine the landscape-level effects of restoring fire to Sierra Nevadan forests. His work includes landscape and disturbance ecology, biogeography, ecophysiology, and statistical analysis of forest landscapes. He was awarded a prestigious three-year Canon National Park Science Scholar Fellowship.  

Kurt worked on a postdoc in Landscape Fire Ecology at Berkeley. He published methods papers assessing ladder fuel hazards and landscape fire dynamics modeling that integrates GIS, remote sensing, fuels analysis, forest ecology and climate analysis. He is a published scientist with a series of methodological and ecological papers. In 2005, Kurt was a visiting scholar at City University of London. 

During recent years he has pursued his love of education by teaching Biogeography, National Park Management, and Bay Area Environmental Issues at San Francisco State University. Teaching classes on park conservation comes naturally as Kurt has spent more than forty years living, working or researching in American National Parks.