Skip to main content

Search by keywords, then use filters to narrow down results by type, year, topic, or ecosystem.

Displaying 1 - 20 of 32

We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and management will be inadequate given the predicted scale of social-economic and biophysical changes in the 21st century. New approaches, focused on anticipating and guiding ecological…
Author(s): Stephen W. Golladay, Katherine L. Martin, James M. Vose, David N. Wear, Alan P. Covich, Richard J. Hobbs, Kier D. Klepzig, Gene E. Likens, Robert J. Naiman, Allan W. Shearer
Year Published:

A growing body of literature examines the vulnerability, risk, resilience, and adaptation of indigenous peoples to climate change. This synthesis of literature brings together research pertaining to the impacts of climate change on sovereignty,…
Author(s): Kathryn Norton-Smith, Kathy Lynn, Karletta Chief, Karen Cozzetto, Jamie Donatuto, Margaret Hiza Redsteer, Linda E. Kruger, Julie Maldonado, Carson Viles, Kyle P. Whyte
Year Published:

The interactions between climate and wildland fire are complex. To better understand these interactions, we used ArcMap 10.2.2 to examine the relationships between early spring snowmelt and total annual area burned within a defined region of the …
Author(s): Donal S. O'Leary, Trevor D. Bloom, Jacob C. Smith, Christopher R. Zemp, Michael J. Medler
Year Published:

Future forests are being shaped by changing climate and disturbances. Climate change is causing large-scale forest declines globally, in addition to distributional shifts of many tree species. Because environmental cues dictate insect seasonality…
Author(s): Barbara J. Bentz, Jacob P. Duncan, James A. Powell
Year Published:

With ongoing public concern regarding climate change and recent drought that has affected many areas of the western United States, this study provides context and direct evidence for the negative impact of water stress on forest ecosystems. The…
Author(s): David L. Peterson, Jeremy S. Littell
Year Published:

Climate change adaptation is a rapidly evolving field in conservation biology and includes a range of strategies from resisting to actively directing change on the landscape. The term ‘climate change resilience,’ frequently used to characterize…
Author(s): Nicholas A. Fisichelli, Gregor W. Schuurman, Cat Hawkins Hoffman
Year Published:

Climate change velocity is a vector depiction of the rate of climate displacement used for assessing climate change impacts. Interpreting velocity requires an assumption that climate trajectory length is proportional to climate change exposure;…
Author(s): Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Sean A. Parks
Year Published:

One component of climate-fire interactions is the relationship between weather conditions concurrent with burning (i.e., fire danger) and the magnitude of fire activity. Here daily environmental conditions are associated with daily observations of…
Author(s): Patrick H. Freeborn, William Matt Jolly, Mark A. Cochrane
Year Published:

Forest ecosystems can act as sinks of carbon and thus mitigate anthropogenic carbon emissions. When forests are actively managed, treatments can alter forests carbon dynamics, reducing their sink strength and switching them from sinks to sources of…
Author(s): Sabina Dore, Danny L. Fry, Brandon M. Collins, Rodrigo Vargas, Robert A. York, Scott L. Stephens
Year Published:

Climate changes are expected to increase fire frequency, fire season length, and cumulative area burned in the western United States. We focus on the potential impact of mid-21st- century climate changes on annual burn probability, fire season…
Author(s): Karen L. Riley, Rachel A. Loehman
Year Published:

Historical and presettlement relationships between drought and wildfire have been well documented in much of North America, with forest fire occurrence and area burned clearly increasing in response to drought. Drought interacts with other controls…
Author(s): Jeremy S. Littell, David L. Peterson, Karen L. Riley, Yongqiang Liu, Charles H. Luce
Year Published:

Fire is an integral component of the Earth system that will critically affect how terrestrial carbon budgets and living systems respond to climate change. Paleo and observational records document robust positive relationships between fire activity…
Author(s): A. Park Williams, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Increased forest fire activity across the western continental United States (US) in recent decades has likely been enabled by a number of factors, including the legacy of fire suppression and human settlement, natural climate variability, and human-…
Author(s): John T. Abatzoglou, A. Park Williams
Year Published:

Soil organic matter plays a key role in the global carbon cycle, representing three to four times the total carbon stored in plant or atmospheric pools. Although fires convert a portion of the faster cycling organic matter to slower cycling black…
Author(s): Wade T. Tinkham, Alistair M. S. Smith, Philip E. Higuera, Jeff A. Hatten, Nolan W. Brewer, Stefan H. Doerr
Year Published:

As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well…
Author(s): Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Attribution
Year Published:

The direct effects of climate change on alpine treeline ecotones – the transition zones between subalpine forest and non-forested alpine vegetation – have been studied extensively, but climate-induced changes in disturbance regimes have received…
Author(s): C. Alina Cansler, Donald McKenzie, Charles B. Hansler
Year Published:

Prior work shows western US forest wildfire activity increased abruptly in the mid-1980s. Large forest wildfires and areas burned in them have continued to increase over recent decades, with most of the increase in lightning-ignited fires. Northern…
Author(s): Anthony L. Westerling
Year Published:

Climate change is often perceived as controversial in the public’s view. One meaningful way scientists can address this problem is to engage with the public to increase understanding of climate change. Attendees of scientific conferences address…
Author(s): Jeffrey A. Hicke, John T. Abatzoglou, Steven Daley-Laursen, Jamie Esler, Lauren E. Parker
Year Published:

Forests near the lower limit of montane tree cover are expected to be particularly vulnerable to warming climate, potentially converting to non-forest for prolonged periods if affected by canopy-removing disturbances. Such disturbance-catalyzed…
Author(s): Daniel C. Donato, Brian J. Harvey, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

Climate and disturbance regimes are both changing rapidly, and it is increasingly important for ecologists and park managers to understand the past and anticipate what lies ahead. The frequency, severity, and extent of natural disturbances are…
Author(s): Monica G. Turner, Daniel C. Donato, Winslow D. Hansen, Brian J. Harvey, William H. Romme, Anthony L. Westerling
Year Published: