Treesearch

The Great Basin floristic region spans three Level III ecoregions (Central Basin and Range, Northern Basin and Range, and Snake River Plain) and makes up a large portion of the Intermountain West of the United States. Over 75% of the Great Basin is publicly owned and managed by the US federal land management agencies, with state agencies also managing large areas. The primary human uses of public lands are grazing and recreation, with mining and oil and gas development found in some locations. The Great Basin has a range of mostly arid and semi-arid ecosystems from salt desert through...

-- Fuel moisture content (FMC) is a crucial driver of forest fires in many regions world-wide. Yet, the dynamics of FMC in forest canopies as well as their physiological and environmental determinants remain poorly understood, especially under extreme drought. -- We embedded a FMC module in the trait-based, plant-hydraulic SurEau-Ecos model to provide innovative process-based predictions of leaf live fuel moisture content (LFMC) and canopy fuel moisture content (CFMC) based on leaf water potential (ψLeaf). SurEau-Ecos- FMC relies on pressure–volume (p-v) curves to simulate LFMC and...

Recent mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreaks have been characterized as unprecedented largely in the absence of information about their occurrence prior to historical documentation. The ability to reconstruct presettlement outbreaks from sediment cores requires the identification and validation of appropriate proxies. In this paper, we provide a Holocene record of vegetation change indicating putative mountain pine beetle outbreaks in a lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta)/mixed-conifer forest at Lake of the Woods, Montana. Using a normalized difference pollen index, we...

Relating environmental DNA (eDNA) signal strength to organism abundance requires a fundamental understanding of eDNA production. A number of studies have demonstrated that eDNA production may scale allometrically - that is, larger organisms tend to exhibit lower mass-specific eDNA production rates, likely due to allometric scaling in key processes related to eDNA production (e.g., surface area, excretion/egestion). While most previous studies have examined intraspecific allometry, physiological rates and organism surface area also scale allometrically across species. We therefore hypothesiz...

Firebrand impingement is a leading cause of home ignitions from wildland fire. The use of porous fencing has recently been proposed as a potential method for mitigating firebrand impingement on homes. A porous fence can act as a windbreak to alter the near-surface flow and induce particle deposition, as demonstrated in other applications, such as the use of snow fences to protect roadways from drifting snow. Conservation advocates have proposed the use of fire-resistant vegetation to act as a fence upwind of homes or subdivisions. Porous fences could also be constructed from fire-resistant...

South Asia, one of the most important food producing regions in the world, is facing a significant threat to food grain production under the influence of extreme high temperatures. Furthermore, the probability of simultaneous trends in extreme precipitation patterns and extreme heat conditions, which can have compounding effects on crops, is a likelihood in South Asia. In this study, we found complex relationships between extreme heat and precipitation patterns, as well as compound effects on major crops (rice and wheat) in South Asia. We also employed event coincidence analysis (ECA) to...

Burn severity assessment is vital for the development of effective fire management strategies. Subtropical forests in Southern China support rich forest resources but are also disturbed by frequent forest fires, resulting in varying burn severity areas. However, the lack of accuracy assessment of burn severity based on spectral indices has limited our understanding of spatial patterns and drivers of burn severity in this region and the implementation of effective forest fire management. In this study, we compared the accuracy of different spectral indices from Landsat 8 Operational Land...

Ensemble habitat selection modeling is becoming a popular approach among ecologists to answer different questions. Since we are still in the early stages of development and application of ensemble modeling, there remain many questions regarding performance and parameterization. One important gap, which this paper addresses, is how the number of background points used to train models influences the performance of the ensemble model. We used an empirical presence-only dataset and three different selections of background points to train scale-optimized habitat selection models using six...

The European Space Agency SnowSAR instrument is a side-looking, dual-polarised (VV/VH), X/Ku band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), operable from various sizes of aircraft. Between 2010 and 2013, the instrument was deployed at several sites in Northern Finland, Austrian Alps and northern Canada. The purpose of the airborne campaigns was to measure the backscattering properties of snow-covered terrain to support the development of snow water equivalent retrieval techniques using SAR. SnowSAR was deployed in Sodankylä, Northern Finland, for a single flight mission in March 2011 and 12 missions...

Ecological theory predicts a pulse disturbance results in loss of soil organic carbon and short-term respiration losses that exceed recovery of productivity in many ecosystems. However, fundamental uncertainties remain in our understanding of ecosystem recovery where spatiotemporal variation in structure and function are not adequately represented in conceptual models. Here we show that wildfire in sagebrush shrublands results in multiscale responses that vary with ecosystem properties, landscape position, and their interactions. Consistent with ecological theory, soil pH increased and...