Journal Article

Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management.

Comparing biosphereatmosphere carbon exchange across monsoon (warm-season rainfall) and Mediterranean (cool-season rainfall) regimes can yield information about the interaction between energy and water limitation.

We assessed the effectiveness of forest fuel thinning projects that explicitly removed surface and ladder fuels (all but one were combined mechanical and prescribed fire/pile burn prescriptions) in reducing fire severity and tree mortality in 12 forest fires that burned in eastern and southern California between 2005 and 2011.

Wildfire effects upon riparian plant community structure, composition, and distribution may strongly influence the dynamic relationships between riparian vegetation and stream ecosystems. However, few studies have examined the influence of fire on these processes.

Practices such as thinning followed by prescribed burning, often termed ‘ecosystem restoration practices’, are being used in Rocky Mountain forests to prevent uncontrolled wildfire and restore forests to pre-settlement conditions. Prior to burning, surface fuels may be left or collected into piles, which may affect fire temperatures and attendant effects on the underlying soil.

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.

Early seral forest habitats are increasingly valued for the unique structural resources they provide in many western US forests. Coarse woody detritus (CWD) are a significant feature of this developmental stage and are highly dynamic, suggesting these environments exhibit temporally diverse structural conditions prior to forest canopy closure.

In temperate conifer forests of the Western USA, there is active debate whether fuels reduction treatments and bioenergy production result in decreased carbon emissions and increased carbon sequestration compared to a no-action alternative.

Herbivory by domestic and wild ungulates can dramatically affect vegetation structure, composition and dynamics in nearly every terrestrial ecosystem of the world.

Mechanical fuel reduction treatments have been implemented on millions of hectares of western North American forests. The redistribution of standing forest biomass to the soil surface by mulching treatments has no ecological analog, and this practice may alter soil processes and forest productivity.