Treesearch

Forest canopy height is a fundamental ecosystem property—influencing patterns of forest carbon storage and forest ecosystem responses to climate variability and change. Previous studies have analyzed environmental drivers influencing spatial variation in canopy height at landscape-to- regional scales; however, far less is known about the environmental determinants underlying regional and global scale variation in forest canopy height. Using the canopy height metrics products from Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), a space-borne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instrument...

Tropical forests abound with regional and local endemic species and house at least half of the species on Earth, while covering less than 7% of its land (Lahssini et al., 2022; Bolívar-Santamaría et al., 2021; Bullock et al., 2020; Wilson, 1988; Gentry, 1988; as cited in Skole and Tucker, 1993). Their clearing, burning, draining, and harvesting can make slopes dangerously unstable, degrade water resources, change local climate, or release to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases (GHGs) the organic carbon (C) that they store in their biomass and soils. These forest disturbances accounted for...

In the past three decades, Puerto Rico (PR) experienced five hurricanes that met or exceeded category three, and they caused severe forest structural damage and elevated tree mortality. To improve our mechanistic understanding of hurricane impacts on tropical forests and assess hurricane‐affected forest dynamics in Earth system models, we use in situ forest measurements at the Bisley Experimental Watersheds in Northeast PR to evaluate the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator coupled with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model Land Model (ELM‐FATES). The observations show...

With increasing frequency and severity, coastal cities are facing the effects of extreme weather events, such as sea-level rise, storm surges, hurricanes, and various types of flooding. Recent urban resilience scholarship suggests that responding to the cascading complexities of climate change requires an understanding of cities as social-ecological-technological systems, or SETS. Advances in data visualization, sensors, and analytics are making it possible for urban planners to gain more comprehensive views of cities. Yet, addressing climate complexity requires more than deploying...

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses are in or near wildland vegetation and where many environmental problems concentrate. Consistent WUI maps across all U.S. lands and territories are therefore needed for effective environmental management and policy efforts. However, such maps are lacking for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here, we mapped the WUI in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for 2010 using the same mapping approach as in the conterminous United States and integrating population census, land cover, and land ownership information. We found...

La vertiente del pacifico de Nicaragua contiene areas naturales como el bosque seco, esta zona, aunque es un mosaico de ecosistemas y microclimas predominan las reducidas precipitaciones con una marcada epoca seca, yes importante para la diversidad aviar por las especies linicas que contiene. Este contiene mas del 50% de las especies reportadas en Nicaragua, ademas de un relevante numero de investigaciones que se han llevado a cabo historicamente y mas activamente en los ultimos 30 años . Esta zona muestra una mezcla d e aves presentes en otras macroregiones como la vertiente del Caribe...

Forest ecosystems absorb and store about 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually and are increasingly shaped by human land use and management. Climate change interacts with land use and forest dynamics to influence observed carbon stocks and the strength of the land carbon sink. We show that climate change effects on modeled forest land carbon stocks are strongest in tropical wildlands that have limited human influence. Global forest carbon stocks and carbon sink strength may decline as climate change and anthropogenic influences intensify, with wildland tropical forests, especially...

Losses in crop yield due to invasive insects, weeds, pathogens, and herbivores cost trillions of dollars per year globally. To prevent further spread of invasive agricultural pest species, continuous monitoring and prevention are crucial. Once introduced, however, assessing the impact of an invasive pest on agricultural production and testing management strategies are essential. The green iguana (Iguana iguana), a globally widespread invasive herbivore, is considered a possible agricultural pest although no quantitative data on its impact are available. In this study, we evaluated the...

The Amazon forest contains globally important carbon stocks, but in recent years, atmospheric measurements suggest that it has been releasing more carbon than it has absorbed because of deforestation and forest degradation. Accurately attributing the sources of carbon loss to forest degradation and natural disturbances remains a challenge because of the difficulty of classifying disturbances and simultaneously estimating carbon changes. We used a unique, randomized, repeated, very high-resolution airborne laser scanning survey to provide a direct, detailed, and high-resolution partitioning...

Plant litter decomposition is driven by soil biota and biophysiochemical conditions as well as substrate quality. Prescribed burns can affect the abundance and diversity of soil arthropods and the biophysiochemical conditions in terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we examined the effects of a prescribed burn on soil arthropods and litter chemistry in decomposing litter during a total of 469-days field incubation using litter from two grasses, Dichanthium annulatum and Megathyrsus maximus, in a subtropical moist pastureland of Puerto Rico. We found the prescribed burn substantially...