Treesearch

Identifying dormancy traits is important for predicting insect population success, particularly in a changing climate that could disrupt evolved traits. The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) is native to North America, is responsible for millions of acres of tree mortality, and is expanding northward in Canada. Research has identified thermal traits important to epidemic-phase ecology that vary among populations. Genomic research identified 3 mountain pine beetle haplogroups representing Pleistocene glacial refugia. Significant variation in generation timing aligning...

Insects live in a wide range of thermal environments and have evolved species- and location-specific physiological processes for survival in hot and cold extremes. Thermally driven dormancy strategies, development rates and thresholds are important for synchronizing cohorts within a population and to local climates and often vary among populations within a species. Mountain pine beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins (Coleoptera: Curculionidae, Scolytinae), is a widely distributed forest insect native to North America with clinal genetic differentiation in thermally dependent...

Fire exclusion is a key factor driving conifer expansion into temperate semi-arid grasslands. However, it remains unclear how reintroducing fire affects the aboveground storage of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in the expanding tree species and below-ground in soils. To assess the impacts of fire reintroduction C and N pools and fluxes in areas of conifer expansion we targeted a region of the Northern Great Plains that has experienced extensive woody plant expansion (WPE) of two species: ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and juniper (Juniperus spp). We quantified tree mortality of both species...

1. Naturally treeless ecosystems are being replaced by native and non-native trees worldwide, often through deliberate afforestation using forestry tree species. By introducing species having novel traits, such as relatively rapid growth, many afforestation efforts also produce numerous changes in ecosystems, at the landscape scale.2. Trees are considered critical for climate change mitigation; indeed, many current carbon sequestration strategies rely on trees. Planting trees or allowing trees to naturally colonize through range expansions can be seen as an ideal way to increase atmospheric...

Prioritizing investments in restoration, risk reduction, and conservation programs is an important part of the planning process to develop strategies for a wide range of resource management issues in the US and elsewhere (Ball et al., 2009; Noss et al., 2009; Kukkala and Moilanen, 2013; Chazdon and Guariguata, 2018; Pohjanmies et al., 2019; Strassburg et al., 2020; Duchardt et al., 2021). Prioritization systems have been developed for application at a range of scales, and typically involve multiple objectives and various schemes for optimization and tradeoff analyses (Noss et al., 2009)....

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with RGB, multispectral, or thermal cameras have demonstrated their potential to provide high-resolution data before, during, and after wildfires and prescribed burns. Pre-burn point clouds generated through the photogrammetric processing of UAV images contain geometrical and spectral information of vegetation, while active fire imagery allows for deriving fire behavior metrics. This paper focuses on characterizing the relationship between the fire rate of spread (RoS) in prescribed burns and a set of independent geometrical, spectral, and neighborho...

Climate change is altering fire regimes and post-fire conditions, contributing to relatively rapid transformation of landscapes across the western US. Studies are increasingly documenting post-fire vegetation transitions, particularly from forest to non-forest conditions or from sagebrush to invasive annual grasses. The prevalence of climate-driven, post-fire vegetation transitions is likely to increase in the future with major impacts on social–ecological systems. However, research and management communities have only recently focused attention on this emerging climate risk, and many...

We assembled the first gridded burned area (BA) database of national wildfire data (ONFIRE), a comprehensive and integrated resource for researchers, non-government organisations, and government agencies analysing wildfires in various regions of the Earth. We extracted and harmonised records from different regions and sources using open and reproducible methods, providing data in a common framework for the whole period available (starting from 1950 in Australia, 1959 in Canada, 1985 in Chile, 1980 in Europe, and 1984 in the United States) up to 2021 on a common 1° × 1° grid. The data...

Accurate drought assessments are critical for mitigating the deleterious impacts of water scarcity on communities across the world. In many regions, deficits in soil moisture represent a key driver of drought conditions. However, relationships between soil moisture and widely used drought indicators have not been thoroughly evaluated. In addition, there has not been an in‐depth assessment of the accuracy of operational soil moisture models used for drought monitoring. Here, we used 2,405 observed time series of soil moisture from 637 long‐term monitoring stations across the conterminous...