Treesearch

Invasibility is a key indicator of community susceptibility to changes in structure and function. The fluctuating resource hypothesis (FRH) postulates that invasibility is an emergent community property, a manifestation of multiple processes that cannot be reliably predicted by individual community attributes like diversity or productivity. Yet, research has emphasized the role of these individual attributes, with the expectation that diversity should deter invasibility and productivity enhance it. In an effort to explore how these and other factors may influence invasibility, we evaluated...

Nontimber forest species, resources, and products in U.S. forests and rangelands provide a range of ecological, social, cultural, and economic goods and services. This diversity creates challenges and opportunities for management and governance in an era of accelerating climatic variability. Climate variability and change will likely affect forest ecosystems with potentially increasing risks of negative consequences to natural resources and associated social-ecological systems (Ryan and Archer 2008). Drought, insect and disease outbreaks, and fre, as well as extreme events are expected to...

Seasonal time series data from satellites are highly desired by researchers from different fields to study our Earth system. Seasonal time series data contain the temporal aspects of natural phenomena on the land surface, which are extremely helpful for discriminating different land cover types (Zhu and Liu, 2014), monitoring vegetation dynamics (Shen et al., 2011), estimating crop yields (Johnson et al., 2016), assessing environmental threats (Garrity et al., 2013), exploring human-nature interactions (Zhu and Woodcock, 2014a), and revealing ecology-climate feedbacks (Piao et al., 2015).

Propagule size and number often vary by several orders of magnitude among co-occurring plant species. Explaining the maintenance of this variation and understanding how propagule size contributes to coexistence remain a central challenge for community ecologists. The dominant paradigm is that a competition-colonization trade‐off maintains interspecific variation in seed size, but empirical support is limited and other coexistence mechanisms, such as size‐dependent seed predation, have not been examined.

We address the climate versus disturbance debate to understand drivers of change in human-environment systems. We examine whether recent increased precipitation episodes (‘pluvials’) are unique and have ecological implications for the humid climate of the eastern United States. Robust statistical analyzes presented here indicate that the 20th century was wet, but not significantly different than other centuries during the last millennium. Statistical methods did not establish increased precipitation episodes as an unusual change that correlated with transition shifts in eastern forests...

As scientists and managers seek to understand fire behavior in conditions that extend beyond the limits of our current empirical models and prior experiences, they will need new tools that foster a more mechanistic understanding of the processes driving fire dynamics and effects. Here we suggest that process-based models are powerful research tools that are useful for investigating a large number of emerging questions in wildland fire sciences. These models can play a particularly important role in advancing our understanding, in part, because they allow their users to evaluate the...

The proper estimation of above-ground biomass (AGB) stocks of managed forests is a prerequisite to quantifying their role in climate change mitigation. The aim of this study was to analyze the spatial variability of AGB and its uncertainty between actively managed pine and unmanaged pine-oak reference forests in central Mexico. To investigate the determinants of AGB, we analyzed variables related to forest management, stand structure, topography, and climate. We developed linear (LM), generalized additive (GAM), and Random Forest (RF) empirical models to derive spatially explicit estimates...

Habitat loss is the greatest threat to biodiversity in Borneo, and to anticipate and combat its effects it is important to predict the pattern of loss and its consequences. Borneo is a region of extremely high biodiversity from which forest is being lost faster than in any other. The little- known Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is the top predator in Borneo and is likely to depend critically on habitat connectivity that is currently being rapidly lost to deforestation. We modeled the effects of landscape fragmentation on population size, genetic diversity and population connectivit...

Often, factors that determine the risk of an environmental hazard occur at landscape scales, and risk mitigation requires action by multiple private property owners. How property owners respond to risk mitigation on neighboring lands depends on whether mitigation actions are strategic complements or strategic substitutes. We test for these neighbor interactions with a case study on wildfire risk mitigation on private properties. We use two measures of wildfire risk mitigation - an assessment by a wildfire professional and a self-assessment by homeowners. Taken together, the two assessments...

In the United States, schools serving urban, low-income students are among the lowestperforming academically. Previous research in relatively well-off populations has linked vegetation in schoolyards and surrounding neighborhoods to better school performance even after controlling for important confounding factors, raising the tantalizing possibility that greening might boost academic achievement. This study extended previous crosssectional research on the "greenness"-academic achievement link to a public school district in which nine out of ten children were eligible for free lunch. In...