Treesearch

Soil respiration (RS) is one of the largest fluxes in the global carbon cycle. It is composed of respiration by roots and heterotrophic organisms, with each component having distinctive drivers and sensitivities and, consequently, varying feedback potential to climate change. Global drivers of the total flux of RS are widely studied and generally accepted, but our understanding of the factors governing its component fluxes lags far behind.

Following decades of fire exclusion, managers are increasingly implementing prescribed fire in southern Appalachian forests. To date, the use of prescribed fire in the region has often been focused on reducing hazardous fuel loads and has typically occurred in the dormant season. Understanding the effects of burning in different periods of plant growth may reveal how burn season influences patterns of vegetative succession. In this study, we compared the effects of prescribed burn treatments conducted in the dormant season (January-early April) vs. the early growing season (mid-late April)...

Effective watershed management and protection of water resources from non-point source pollution require identification, prioritization, and targeting of pollutant source areas. Process-based hydrology and water quality models are powerful heuristic tools for land and water resources managers. However, because of their complexity, such models are often under-utilized as management prioritization and planning tools. In this paper, we present a prioritization, interactive visualization, and analysis tool (Pi-VAT) that is programmed to synthesize multi-scenario, multi-watershed outputs from...

Monitoring forest structural properties is critical for a range of applications because structure is key to understanding and quantifying forest biophysical functioning, including stand dynamics, evapotranspiration, habitat, and recovery from disturbances. Monitoring of forest structural properties at desirable frequencies and cost globally is enabled by space-borne LiDAR missions such as the global ecosystem dynamics investigation (GEDI) mission. This study assessed the accuracy of GEDI estimates for canopy height, total plant area index (PAI), and vertical profile of plant area volume...

Understanding factors that influence real-world public conservation behaviors is critical for developing successful conservation policies and management actions. Citizens of Colorado, USA recently passed a ballot initiative to restore the gray wolf to its former range within the state. The > 3 million votes offer an unprecedented opportunity to test factors that influenced decisions to support or oppose this conservation action. We created spatial linear regression models to assess the relationship between support for wolf restoration and (1) the presidential vote, (2) distance to conservat...

Landscape connectivity, the extent to which a landscape facilitates the flow of ecological processes such as organism movement, has emerged as a central focus of landscape ecology and conservation science. Connectivity modelling now encompasses an enormous body of work across ecological theory and application. The dominant connectivity models in use today are based on the framework of 'landscape resistance', which is a way of measuring how landscape structure influences movement patterns. However, the simplistic assumptions and high degree of reductionism inherent to the landscape resistanc...

Geography is a fundamentally important discipline that provides a framework for understanding the complex surface of our Earth. This complexity can be interpreted from at least two points of view according to Malanson [1]. The first interpretation is the complex pattern of geographic features. These geographic features can be either natural, such as the coast of Britain, or manmade, such as the road networks of a metropolis. The second interpretation is the interacting processes of different geographic features. In essence, these are two sides of the same coin. Spatial complexity arises...

Species occur in sympatric assemblages, bound together by ecological relationships and interspecific interactions. Borneo and Sumatra host some of the richest assemblages of biota worldwide. The region, however, faces the highest global deforestation rates, which seriously threaten its unique biodiversity. We used a large camera trap dataset that recorded data for 70 terrestrial species of mammals and birds, to explore the drivers of regional species richness patterns. Using a multi-scale, multivariate modelling framework which quantified the main environmental factors associated with...

Bedload transport is a fundamental process by which coarse sediment is transferred through landscapes by river networks and may be well described stochastically by distributions of grain step length and rest time obtained through tracer studies. To date, none of these published tracer studies have specifically investigated the influence of large wood in the river channel on sediment transport dynamics, limiting the applicability of stochastic sediment transport models in these settings. Large wood is a major component of many forested rivers and is increasing due to anthropogenic ‘Natural...