We developed a process that links the mechanistic power of dynamic global vegetation models with the detailed vegetation dynamics of state-and-transition models to project local vegetation shifts driven by projected climate change.
The Fourmile Canyon Fire burned in the fall of 2010 in the Rocky Mountain Front Range adjacent to Boulder, Colorado. The fire occurred in steep, rugged terrain, primarily on privately owned mixed ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests.
Recent research and species distribution modeling predict large changes in the distributions of species and vegetation types in the western interior of the United States in response to climate change.
Declining forest health attributed to associations between extensive bark beetle-caused tree mortality, accumulations of hazardous fuels, wildfire, and climate change have catalyzed changes in forest health and wildfire protection policies of land management agencies.
This guide describes the benefits, opportunities, and trade-offs concerning fuel treatments in the dry mixed conifer forests of northern California and the Klamath Mountains, Pacific Northwest Interior, northern and central Rocky Mountains, and Utah.
Fire will play an important role in shaping forest and stream ecosystems as the climate changes. Historic observations show increased dryness accompanying more widespread fire and forest die-off. These events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems and sometimes generate stepwise changes in ecosystems. Climate vulnerability assessments need to account for fire in their calculus.
Future disruptions to fire activity will threaten ecosystems and human well-being throughout the world, yet there are few fire projections at global scales and almost none from a broad range of global climate models (GCMs).
Projecting future distributions of ecosystems or species climate niches has widely been used to assess the potential impacts of climate change. However, variability in such projections for the future periods, particularly the variability arising from uncertain future climates, remains a critical challenge for incorporating these projections into climate change adaptation strategies.
Conservation science strives to inform management decisions. Applying niche models in concert with future climate projections to project species vulnerability to extinction, range size loss, or distribution shifts has emerged as a potentially useful tool for informing resource management decisions.
Land surface properties, such as vegetation cover and soil moisture, influence the partitioning of radiative energy between latent and sensible heat fluxes in daytime hours. During dry periods, soil-water deficit can limit evapotranspiration, leading to warmer and drier conditions in the lower atmosphere.