Thomas Buchholz, PhD, is co-director of the Forests and Agriculture Team at Spatial Informatics Group. With over two decades of experience in forest management, his focus is on sustainability metrics, wildfire risk, bioenergy, as well as energy and carbon life cycle assessments (LCA), and economics. He leads projects for the private, public and non-profit sectors.
He is an expert on economic approaches that incorporate revenue streams from both traditional (timber) and innovative (carbon, ecosystem services) sources. In this capacity, he has led the effort to establish a methodology for Reduced Emissions from Megafires (REM) that enables forest restoration treatments to tap into the carbon market. For this effort, he recently received the CARROT award by the Climate Action Reserve.
He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature and through technical reports; ranging from carbon LCA’s for wildfire-prone forests in the western US to bioenergy economics in East Africa.
He has affiliations with the University of Montana, Strathmore University in Nairobi, and the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont.
Thomas holds a master’s in Forest Science from the University of Freiburg (Germany) and a doctorate in Sustainable Bioenergy Systems from the State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry. He lives in Missoula, Montana.