About Me

Dr. Neufeld recently retired from being a Professor in the Department of Biology at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC after 39 years of teaching and doing research. He received his B.S. in Forestry from Rutgers University in 1975, an M.F. in Forest Sciences from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Georgia in 1984. He was a post-doctoral researcher at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM and then a National Research Council Associate at the EPA Lab in Corvallis, OR. He served as President of both The Association of Southeastern Biologists and the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society and is currently a member of the Torrey Botanical Society, the Botanical Society of America, the Ecological Society of America, and the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society. He was the first Chair of AppalAIR, the interdisciplinary atmospheric research group at Appalachian State and the first Director of the Southern Appalachian Environmental Research and Education Center which resides within Appstate’s Research Institute for the Environment, Energy and Economics.

His research expertise is in plant ecophysiology, which has taken to swamps, deserts, and forests. For over 35 years, he was active in air pollution effects research and was principal investigator of a National Park - EPA project investigating the effects of ozone effects on plants native to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He has published 50 papers and one book chapter, and mentored 32 graduate students, eight of whom have completed their Ph.Ds at other institutions, as well as 6 Honors students. His students have also won numerous awards for their research at both regional and national society meetings.

He is the recipient of several awards at Appalachian State University for his research, including being named the Donald W. Sink Outstanding Researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences

and the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member from the School of Graduate Studies. He also won the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Association of Southeastern Biologists and won

their Senior Research Award. He received over $1 million in external funding from the NSF, NPS, EPA, TVA and National Geographic Society, and served as a consulting member on two EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committees reviewing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone.

For many years, Dr. Dan Patillo, professor of plant ecology at Western Carolina University, was the go-to guy for fall leaf color predictions. Dan grew up on a farm south of Asheville and had intimate ties to the land as a result. At WCU, he used his knowledge of the natural and ecological histories of the forests in western North Carolina to provide predictions on the quality and timing of fall leaf color to the visitor bureau for North Carolina.

 When Dan decided to retire Visit NC asked who he would recommend as someone to take over this duty, and he provided them with my name. I had been working on the ecophysiology of plants that produce red pigments in their leaves and of course, this eventually led to observing trees that produced red leaves in the fall. So I began watching the trees and learning from Dan about the timing of fall leaf colors, which trees turned early or late, and what contributed to making a good fall color season versus conditions that led to drab colors. 

Visit NC asked me to provide short updates on the status of fall leaf color for the western NC mountains, which involved a lot of driving up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway during the height of the season. But as a professor, I wanted to let people know more about why trees turned color, how climate change might affect this process, and how important it was to the tourist industry in the western part of the state. 

So, to accommodate my tendency to write more than what VISIT NC wanted, I started the Fall Color Guy webpage. Each week I would add my observations about the status of the trees, along with photos I took visiting various popular view points along the Blue Ridge Parkway and other roads which had good fall leaf color. 

Then, VISIT NC decided to go with leaf color observations from rangers in various state parks along the entire span of the western mountains. This made sense and took pressure off me to drive several hundred miles each week during peak color season. At this point, I focused on my Fall Color Guy page and as word spread, it became a very popular website for people to consult so they could determine when to come to the mountains to see the trees. At its peak a few years before Hurricane Helene the page garnered nearly 70,000 weekly visits and today has 27,500 followers.

 I also started posting my observations on the Department of Biology’s webpage at Appalachian State University, and for a time, it was the most visited page at the University. It is on that page that I began archiving a variety of essays on the science and economics of fall leaf colors and viewers can still access those essays today.