Treesearch

Until fairly recently, the majority of landscape connectivity analyses have considered connectivity as a static landscape feature, despite the widespread recognition that landscapes and the abiotic and biotic processes that influence them are dynamic. With the advent of new analytical techniques and the increasing availability of time-series data to characterize landscape dynamics, more connectivity analyses are addressing dynamics in landscapes that can arise from changes in environmental conditions, the planning environment, and social-ecological systems. Inspired by a symposium at the...

Rangeland production is a foundational ecosystem service and resource on which livestock, wildlife, and people depend. Capitalizing on recent advancements in the use of remote sensing data across rangelands, we provide estimates of herbaceous rangeland production from 1986 to 2019 at 16-d and annual time steps and 30-m resolution across the western United States. A factorial comparison of this dataset and three national scale datasets is presented, and we highlight a multiple-lines-of-evidence approach when using production estimates in decision making. Herbaceous aboveground biomass at...

Orasema minutissima Howard (Hymenoptera: Eucharitidae) is recorded from the Hawaiian Islands for the first time. It has been established on the island of Hawai‘i since at least 2019. The wasp is a parasitoid of the immature stages of Pheidole and Wasmannia (Formicidae: Myrmicinae), both of which are significant pests on several of the Hawaiian Islands. Already found in substantial numbers, the wasp is a potential biological control agent for Wasmannia auropunctata, the Little Fire Ant.

The oyamel forests, as Abies dominated forests are commonly known as, register their largest distribution (95% of their population) along the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (TMVB). Although efforts have been made to study these forests with various approaches, dendrochronology-based studies have been limited, particularly in pure Abies forests in this region. The objective of this study was to reconstruct fire regimes in an Abies religiosa forest in the Sierra Norte in the state of Puebla, Mexico. Within an area of 50-ha, we collected 40 fire-scar samples, which were processed and analyzed...

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) recognizes growing climate risks across its responsibilities as land manager, operator of hundreds of installations, and in its core mission to protect national security. However, DoD climate risk reduction is complicated by frequent leadership turnover among base commanders, which encourages focus on near-term challenges, and changing US government priorities that downplay climate risk. We used risk-based deliberation, through workshops, with climate scenario-based fire and flood impact modeling to evaluate risk and adaptation opportunities at...

With invasive grasses increasing wildfire occurrence worldwide, a better understanding of the relationships between native plants, fire, and invasive grass is needed to help restoration plans facilitate ecosystem resilience. Invasive grasses are particularly problematic for altering fire regimes in the tropics, yet in Hawai'i, restoration sites are often planted with monocultures of the native tree Acacia koa, which can promote grass growth via nitrogen fixation. This, combined with the difficulty of estimating pre-fire grass cover under thick canopies, complicates attempts to restore...

Climate change, with warming temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns, may increase natural-caused forest fire activity. Increasing natural-caused fires throughout western United States national forests could place people, property, and infrastructure at risk in the future. We used the fine K nearest neighbor (KNN) method coupled with the downscaled Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA) climate dataset to estimate changes in the rate of natural-caused fires in western United States national forests. We projected changes in the rate of minor and major forest fires from...

In October 2020, under COVID-19 quarantine, AmeriFlux held its largest and one of its most successful annual meetings. Historically, ∼100 scientists attend; this meeting had over 400 registrants and participants. Participants expressed that this was among the best virtual meetings that they had ever attended, and 100% of post-meeting survey respondents stated that they would attend again. Feedback revealed the meeting fostered a strong sense of connection to the AmeriFlux community, especially among early career and international scientists. How did a feeling of strong connection to the...

Expanding the global protected area network is critical for addressing biodiversity declines and the climate crisis. However, how climate change will affect ecosystem representation within the protected area network remains unclear. Here we use spatial climate analogs to examine potential climate-driven shifts in terrestrial ecoregions and biomes under a +2 °C warming scenario and associated implications for achieving 30% area-based protection targets. We find that roughly half of land area will experience climate conditions that correspond with different ecoregions and nearly a quarter...

The cause of recent wildfire catastrophes can be traced to multiple factors, including the expanding urban footprint (Radeloff et al. 2018), human ignitions (Nagy et al. 2018), droughts (Littell et al. 2016) and high-wind events (Abatzoglou et al. 2018). In 2018, over 58,000 wildfires burned 8.8 million acres in the western U.S. (NIFC 2018). As wildfire frequency and intensity increase (Westerling 2016, Abatzoglou et al. 2017), understanding the impacts of high-severity wildfire on ecosystem function is critical, particularly the negative effects on soils (Certini 2005) and drinking water...