Climate Change and Fire

The role of fire and climate in determining savanna and forest distributions requires comprehensive theoretical reevaluation. Empirical studies show that climate constrains maximum tree cover and that fire feedbacks can reduce tree cover substantially, but neither the stability nor the dynamics of these systems are well understood.

The 2012 wildfire season isn’t over yet, but already this year is shaping up to be the one of the worst on record in the American West.

Using forests to sequester carbon in response to anthropogenically induced climate change is being considered across the globe. A recent U.S. executive order mandated that all federal agencies account for sequestration and emissions of greenhouse gases, highlighting the importance of understanding how forest carbon stocks are influenced by wildfire.

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).

We examined potential impacts of climate change over the next century on eight mammal species of conservation concern in western Washington State, under four warming scenarios.

Climate change is a poorly understood, emerging threat to many amphibian species. One of the ways climate change is likely to affect amphibians is through increased recruitment failure associated with more frequent climatic extremes.

Over the 20th century, surface water temperatures have increased in many lake ecosystems around the world, but long-term trends in the vertical thermal structure of lakes remain unclear, despite the strong control that thermal stratification exerts on the biological response of lakes to climate change.

Physiological tolerance of environmental conditions can influence species-level responses to climate change. Here, we used species-specific thermal tolerances to predict the community responses of ant species to experimental forest-floor warming at the northern and southern boundaries of temperate hardwood forests in eastern North America.

During the 21st century, climate-driven changes in fire regimes will be a key agent of change in forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW).

The “pyroclimatic hypothesis” proposed by F. Biondi and colleagues provides a basis for testable expectations about climatic and other controls of fire regimes. This hypothesis asserts an a priori relationship between the occurrence of widespread fire and values of a relevant climatic index.