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The climate record of Priest River Experimental Forest has the potential to provide a century-long history of northern Rocky Mountain forest ecosystems. The record, which began in 1911 with the Benton Flat Nursery control weather station, included…
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We studied the effects of a shift in the fire regime of an ecosystem that is very sensitive to climate change: the ecotone from closed forest to open alpine tundra, hereafter the alpine treeline ecotone (ATE). Results suggest that ATEs will become…
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Disturbances are fundamental components of ecosystems and, in many cases, a dominant driver of ecosystem structure and function at multiple spatial and temporal scales. While the effect of any one disturbance may be relatively well…
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Time-varying fire-climate relationships may represent an important component of fire-regime variability, relevant for understanding the controls of fire and projecting fire activity under global-change scenarios. We used time-varying statistical…
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Evidence of shifting dominance among major forest disturbance agent classes regionally to globally has been emerging in the literature. For example, climate-related stress and secondary stressors on forests (e.g., insect and disease, fire) have…
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It is hypothesized that climate impacts forest mosaics through dynamic ecological processes such as wildfires. However, climate-fire research has primarily focused on understanding drivers of fire frequency and area burned, largely due to scale…
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Little research has focused on the economic impact associated with climate-change induced wildland fire on natural ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. We examine changes in wildland fire patterns based on the U.S. Forest Service's…
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Downscaled climate models provide projections of how climate change may exacerbate the local impacts of natural hazards. The extent to which people facing exacerbated hazard conditions understand or respond to climate-related changes to local…
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Very large fires (VLFs) have important implications for communities, ecosystems, air quality and fire suppression expenditures. VLFs over the contiguous US have been strongly linked with meteorological and climatological variability. Building on…
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Global climate model (GCM) output typically needs to be bias corrected before it can be used for climate change impact studies. Three existing bias correction methods, and a new one developed here, are applied to daily maximum temperature and…
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Studies project that a warming climate will likely increase wildfire activity in many areas (Westerling and others 2002; Flannigan and others 2005, 2009; Littell and others 2009). These analyses are often of aggregate statistics like annual area…
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Aim: Studies of fire activity along environmental gradients have been undertaken, but the results of such studies have yet to be integrated with fire-regime analysis. We characterize fire-regime components along climate gradients and a gradient of…
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The Third National Climate Assessment (NCA) process for the United States focused in part on developing a system of indicators to communicate key aspects of the physical climate, climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and preparedness to inform…
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Recent mandates in the United States require federal agencies to incorporate climate change science into land management planning efforts. These mandates target possible adaptation and mitigation strategies. However, the degree to which climate…
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In order to understand fire's impacts on vegetation dynamics, it is crucial that the distribution of fire sizes be known. We approached this distribution using a power-law distribution, which derives from self-organized criticality theory (SOC). We…
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It is hypothesized that climate impacts forest mosaics through dynamic ecological processes such as wildfires. However, climate-fire research has primarily focused on understanding drivers of fire frequency and area burned, largely due to scale…
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The prospect of rapidly changing climates over the next century calls for methods to predict their effects on myriad, interactive ecosystem processes. Spatially explicit models that simulate ecosystem dynamics at fine (plant, stand) to coarse (…
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Climate strongly influences global wildfire activity, and recent wildfire surges may signal fire weather-induced pyrogeographic shifts. Here we use three daily global climate data sets and three fire danger indices to develop a simple annual metric…
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The risk of bark beetle outbreaks is widely predicted to increase because of a warming climate that accelerates temperature-driven beetle population growth and drought stress that impairs host tree defenses. However, few if any studies have…
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Climate change is expected to alter the frequency and severity of atmospheric conditions conducive for wildfires. In this study, we assess potential changes in fire weather conditions for the contiguous United States using the Haines Index (HI), a…
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