He is also a research scientist with the National Center for Geographic Information Analysis. He is the author or coauthor of 7 refereed publications, and the presenter or copresenter of 19 conference papers. He has received research funding from the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Science Council of British Columbia, and Parks Canada. Larsen's research interests fall broadly into the categories of biogeography, global change, landscape ecology, natural hazards, and Quaternary studies. More specifically, his research is focused on the interrelations between forest fires, climate change and vegetation dynamics.
Wildfires affect natural and human systems.
Knowledge of the frequency of wildfires is an important step in understanding their role in natural ecosystems and minimizing their impacts on human systems. Larsen uses include plant identification, tree-ring analysis, fossil pollen analysis and geochemical analysis. The analytic methods he uses on these data and historical records of climate and fire include GIS, environmental modeling and multivariate statistics. The geographic foci of Larsen's research are the subalpine forest of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the boreal forest of northern Alberta, the temperate rainforest of British Columbia, the old growth hemlock - white pine forests of western New York, and the urban forests of Amherst and Buffalo. Education Ph.D. in Geography, McMaster University, 1994.