Farewell Carl Key! Enjoy Your Retirement!

Carl Key has reached a 30 year milestone in federal government service. Over this time Carl has had a variety of experiences with the federal government both with the National Park Service and USGS. Carl started his journey in Glacier National Park as a graduate student at the University of Montana studying small mammal communities in the North Fork Flathead River drainage. He began his career with Glacier National Park as an ecologist and expanded his horizons to include an interest in Geographic Information Systems. During his tenure at Glacier, he established one of the preeminent GIS programs in the country. A little known fact is that Carl was the original author of the proposal that led to the establishment of the Park’s climate change program. He designed and implemented the first comparative study showing that the glaciers of the Park were shrinking at an alarming rate. As Carl moved from the NPS to USGS he expanded his interests to include wildfire behavior and prediction. Carl was one of the pioneers in using remotely sensed data to evaluate the severity of wildfires and he developed an Index of Burn Severity that is widely used by resource management agencies in the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program. This work has received international recognition by researchers and practitioners alike. He and his colleagues have recently expanded some of this work to evaluate the effects of changing climate on trends in burn severity throughout the western United States.

Beyond any specific scientific achievement, Carl is notable for both his humility and generosity. Over the years, he has given freely of his time and his extraordinarily broad expertise in subject areas that cover the spectrum from fire ecology to remote sensing, computer programming, wildlife biology, and GIS. A quiet person by nature, Carl has consistently avoided the limelight. Nonetheless, he is well-recognized by his many friends and colleagues as a thoughtful and meticulous scientist who leads by example. He and his wife Lindy have two wonderful children and spend as much time with their grandchildren as possible. Please join us in congratulating Carl for a productive 30 years.