Treesearch

Domestic animals represent the largest mammalian biomass on Earth, creating an urgent need to understand their effects on native species. Environmental change may further alter these interactions, particularly for large herbivores that are highly sensitive to climate‐driven resource availability.Interactions among assemblages of large herbivores include interference and exploitation competition, but the grazing optimization hypothesis paradigm suggests that interactions are often facilitative because defoliation from grazing stimulates compensatory regrowth of high‐quality forage that...

Biological nitrogen (N) fixation (BNF) provides the N needed to produce proteins and other biological building blocks, helping feed humanity and mitigate climate change. Due to its high energetic cost compared to other forms of N acquisition, biotic investment in BNF indicates N limitation. Globally gridded BNF flux data provide an opportunity to determine the energetic investment in BNF across ecosystems, which would help reconcile conflicting indicators of N limitation. Here, we use a new BNF synthesis to quantify the relative importance of BNF in different N‐fixing niches, in different...

Drought is a natural part of the Southeastern United States climate and a threat to agricultural productivity and profitability. Whether slow developing or rapid onset, droughts can have negative effects on agricultural crops and livestock, depending on timing, severity, and length. Droughts are expected to become increasingly common in the Southeast due to increasing temperatures, longer dry periods between rain events, and growing water demand across the region. To help producers remain resilient and productive in the face of this threat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southeast...

Acid hydrotropic fractionation using maleic acid, a US FDA approved indirect food additive, can rapidly (20 min) dissolve wood lignin at low temperatures (70–110 ◦C). This study characterized the physical and chemical properties, i.e., color, molecular weight, solubility, and chemical structure of maleic acid hydrotropic fractionation dissolved wood lignin (MAHL) obtained under various fractionation conditions. The study also demonstrated valorization of MAHL for two polymeric applications through direct mixing with (1) commercial sunscreen for its light color and UV protection capability,...

Climate change is driving unprecedented declines in dominant, habitat-forming foundation species across marine and terrestrial ecosystems globally. As climatic novelty becomes the norm, ecosystem reassembly will become increasingly common. Predicting and understanding these transitions, and their implications for future ecosystem functioning, is essential for designing effective forward-looking management strategies. We explored 3 scenarios that describe a range of ecosystem reassembly trajectories following declines in previously dominant habitat-forming taxa: compensation, in which...

Despite a growing need to expand the pace and scale of prescribed burning to address the national fire deficit, there is a lack of data-driven methods to incorporate fire danger information into prescribed fire planning. We assembled nearly two decades of prescribed fire and wildfire records across Montana and Idaho and combined these records with spatially explicit fire danger data. We implement a nonparametric cutpoint analysis to identify objective thresholds from the Energy Release Component (ERC) percentile, treating pile burns, broadcast burns, and wildfires as ordinal classes along...

Next-generation models of fire behavior and smoke production rely on gridded, 3D inputs of wildland fuel complexes. We used a hierarchically scaled sampling design to characterize canopy and surface fuels that are common to prescribed burning programs in the southeastern and western US. Sampling included airborne laser scanning, terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, and destructive field sampling. The objective of this study was to use a combination of airborne laser scanning (ALS), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), structure-from-motion photogrammetry (SfM), and field...

Reliable resilience indicators are urgently needed to monitor global forest health under increasing climate stress. Lag-1 temporal autocorrelation (TAC) of satellite vegetation indices captures forest recovery speed and is widely used as a resilience metric, but its mechanistic underpinnings and methodological reliability have been questioned. Here we use Landsat observations and field data from the Amazon to investigate how satellite-derived TAC relates to in situ measurements of the hydraulic safety margin (HSM), a key physiological trait for plants’ capacity to accommodate drier...

Rising timber demand is transforming forest structure globally, profoundly affecting biodiversity and climate resilience. Logging‐driven fragmentation is potentially a major driver of biodiversity loss in production landscapes, yet its interactions with escalating climate stressors remain poorly understood.We combine two decades of Landsat‐derived habitat metrics with 29,000 surveys of the marbled murrelet ( Brachyramphus marmoratus )—an iconic Pacific Northwest old‐forest specialist seabird affecting management of >10 million hectares. Controlling for habitat amount and detection probabili...

The dataset is a spatially and temporally organized curated subset of National Infrared Operations Program real-time high-resolution fire perimeter acquisitions for the Western United States from 2020 to 2024. The U.S. Forest Service’s National Infrared Operations is an ordered resource that flies only when requested and prioritized, and which tracks and documents wildfire progression over time. Through a structured data retrieval, consolidation, and metadata curation process, the dataset organizes fire perimeters and associated attributes to facilitate the temporal and spatial reconstructi...