Treesearch

Climate change is anticipated to affect freshwater resources, but baseline data on the functioning of tropical watersheds is lacking, limiting efforts that seek to predict how watershed processes, water supply, and streamflow respond to anticipated changes in climate and vegetation change, and to management. To address this data gap, we applied the distributed hydrology soil vegetation model (DHSVM) across 88 watersheds spanning a highly constrained, 4500 mm mean annual rainfall (MAR) gradient on Hawai‘i Island to quantify stream flow at 3-h time-steps for eight years in response to the...

The Blue Mountains Adaptation Partnership was developed to identify climate change issues relevant to resource management in the Blue Mountains region, to find solutions that can minimize negative effects of climate change, and to facilitate transition of diverse ecosystems to a warmer climate. Partnering organizations included three national forests (Malheur, Umatilla, Wallowa-Whitman National Forests), the Pacific Northwest Research Station and Pacific Northwest Region of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, the University of Washington, and the Climate Impacts Research...

Recent advancements in camera trap technology have allowed researchers to explore methodologies that are minimally invasive, and both time and cost efficient (Long et al. 2008; O’Connell et al. 2010; Gregory et al. 2014; Meek et al. 2014; Swinnen et al. 2014; Newey et al. 2015). The use of cameras for understanding the distribution and ecology of mammals is advanced; however, their utility for surveying other vertebrate fauna is mostly unknown (Ariefiandy et al. 2013; Welbourne 2013; Bennetts and Clements 2014; Welbourne et al. 2015). Triggering systems using active-infrared (AIR) or...

Trees in more competitive environments appear to respond to climate differently than trees in less competitive environments. In turn, climate patterns may affect inter- or intra-specific competition, favoring certain individuals over others. Using dendrochronological methods, we sampled cores from dominant pine trees and their nearby competitors in 40 stands in the northern Sierra Nevada. Our dendroclimatological analyses showed complex responses to climate for the dominant pine and their competitors. Pinus lambertiana Dougl. and Pinus ponderosa Dougl. Ex P. & C. Laws benefited from cooler...

Aim There is mounting concern that climate change will lead to the collapse of cyclic population dynamics, yet the influence of climate variability on population cycling remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that variability in survival and fecundity, driven by climate variability at different points in the life cycle, scales up from local populations to drive regional characteristics of population cycling and spatial synchronization.Location Forest in the US Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region.Methods We tested hypotheses linking variation in vital rates of Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa...

Until now, scientifically reliable data on plentering of light-demanding tree species in Europe have been lacking. This gap is filled with long-term trials from the USA, among others with southern yellow pines. In the southern state of Arkansas, two plots of 16 hectares were installed in 1936, in the context of a large-scale trial of mixed loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) and shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata Miller) stands, in which plentering has been applied using single-tree harvest of predominantly sawtimber-sized trees (dbh >30 cm) with natural regeneration. The aim of the experiment is...

Context Temperate grasslands and their dependent species are exposed to high variability in weather and climate due to the lack of natural buffers such as forests. Grassland birds are particularly vulnerable to this variability, yet have failed to shift poleward in response to recent climate change like other bird species in North America. However, there have been few studies examining the effect of weather on grassland bird demography and consequent influence of climate change on population persistence and distributional shifts. Objectives The goal of this study was to estimate the...

As a primary flux in the global water cycle, evapotranspiration (ET) connects hydrologic and biological processes and is directly affected by water and land management, land use change and climate variability. Satellite remote sensing provides an effective means for diagnosing ET patterns over heterogeneous landscapes; however, limitations on the spatial and temporal resolution of satellite data, combined with the effects of cloud contamination, constrain the amount of detail that a single satellite can provide. In this study, we describe an application of a multi-sensor ET data fusion...

Accurately monitoring global vegetation dynamics with modern remote sensing is critical for understanding the functions and processes of the biosphere and its interactions with the planetary climate. The MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) vegetation index (VI) product has been a primary data source for this purpose. To date, theMODIS teamhad released several versions of VI products that havewidely used in global change studies and practical applications. In this study, we re-examined the global vegetation activity by comparing the recent MODIS Collection 6 (C6) VIs with...

Forest fires cause large emissions of C (carbon), N (nitrogen) and Hg (mercury) to the atmosphere and thus have important implications for global warming (e.g. via CO2 and N2O emissions), anthropogenic fertilisation of natural ecosystems (e.g. via N deposition), and bioaccumulation of harmful metals in aquatic and terrestrial systems (e.g. via Hg deposition). Research indicates that fires are becoming more severe over much of North America, thus increasing element emissions during fire. However, there has been little research relating forest floor and mineral soil losses of C, N and Hg to...