About

About The Show

The flagship show, The Forester’s Forecast is a one-on-one interview series. Each episode features a conversation with a forest biometrician or analyst, exploring their education, career path, research contributions, and day-to-day work in the field. The goal is simple: to give these individuals the recognition they rarely receive outside their own discipline, and to preserve their stories for the people who will follow in their footsteps.

This podcast began as a personal project. After the passing of my graduate advisor, Dr. Harold Burkhart — widely regarded as the father of modern forest biometrics — I realized how much of his remarkable life story remained unknown, even to many who had worked alongside him for years. Biography and autobiography are almost unheard of in our field; the people who advance forest science rarely have their histories written down. The Forester’s Forecast is my attempt to change that, one interview at a time — documenting the careers, insights, and personal journeys of the individuals shaping forest biometrics today, before those stories are lost.

Beyond the main interviews, the show includes two companion series:

The Grad Student Spotlight A series dedicated to graduate students currently pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D. in the field. Each episode gives a student the spotlight to showcase their research, share what drew them to it, and talk through their career goals — offering a platform to the next generation of forest biometricians and analysts.

A Band of Biometricians A roundtable-style series bringing together several biometricians at once to discuss current hot topics shaping the field of forest biometrics. Where the main interviews focus on one person’s story, this series captures the conversations happening across the field right now.

About the Host

Micky G. Allen II, Ph.D., CF, grew up in the Piney Woods of East Texas, where he spent much of his childhood hiking, fishing, and hunting the surrounding forests. Forestry runs in the family as his grandfather and great-grandfather both worked in logging, and one of his first jobs in high school was on a local logging crew. It was through the Texas FFA’s Woodland Clinic, competing in dendrology, mensuration, biometrics, and silviculture, that he first discovered forest management as a career path.

Micky went on to earn a B.S. in Forest Management (2008) and an M.S. in Forest Biometrics (2010) from the Arthur Temple College of Forestry at Stephen F. Austin State University, studying under Dr. Dean Coble. He then completed his Ph.D. in Forest Biometrics at Virginia Tech (2016) under Dr. Harold Burkhart, the same advisor whose life and legacy would later inspire this podcast.

After finishing his doctorate, Micky worked as a Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO) in the Forest and Climate Department. In 2020, he moved to Mobile, Alabama to join Larson & McGowin as a consulting biometrician, where he now serves as lead architect of THOR, the firm’s proprietary growth-and-yield and harvest scheduling system, managing projects in harvest planning and forest inventory analysis. In 2025, he and his family relocated to Auburn, Alabama, where he continues his work with Larson & McGowin.