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The impacts of climate change and forest pests and diseases are making it harder for natural resource managers to sustain important forest habitat for wildlife species and, more generally, sustain the benefits that we all derive from forest ecosystems. The natural resource management and research communities have a general understanding of what broad climate adaptation strategies may to best to navigate these mounting challenges. But what we don’t yet fully understand is how effective implementation of these broad strategies actually is, in particular forest types and in particular places. Plus, the research community needs to better understand what knowledge and tools managers need to resolve remaining uncertainties...
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Abstract (from Journal of Applied Ecology): Increasing heat and aridity in coming decades is expected to negatively impact tree growth and threaten forest sustainability in dry areas. Maintaining low stand density has the potential to mitigate the negative effects of increasingly severe droughts by minimizing competitive intensity. However, the direct impact of stand density on the growing environment (i.e. soil moisture), and the specific drought metrics that best quantify that environment, are not well explored for any forest ecosystem. We examined the relationship of varying stand density (i.e. basal area) on soil moisture and stand‐level growth in a long‐term (multi‐decadal), ponderosa pine Pinus ponderosa,...
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Abstract (from Ecosphere): Spruce–fir (Picea–Abies) forests of the North American Acadian Forest Region are at risk of disappearing from the northeastern United States and Canada due to climate change. Species distribution models (SDMs) have been used to predict changes in this critical transitional ecosystem in the past, but none have addressed how seasonal patterns of temperature and precipitation interact to influence tree species abundance. Inferences have also been limited by contemporary inventory data that could not fully characterize species ranges because they either, (1) only sampled species occurrence after large-scale human disturbance and settlement, or (2) did not span critical geopolitical boundaries...
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Abstract (from CanadianSciencePub): Sustaining the structure, function, and services provided by forest ecosystems in the face of changing climate and disturbance regimes represents a grand challenge for forest managers and policy makers. To address this challenge, a range of adaptation approaches have been proposed centered on conferring ecosystem resilience and adaptive capacity; however, considerable uncertainty exists regarding how to translate these broad and often theoretical adaptation frameworks to on-the-ground practice. Complicating this issue has been movement away, in some cases, from other recent advances in forest management, namely ecological silviculture strategies that often focus on restoration....
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Abstract (from Conservation Science and Practice): On a warming planet, a key challenge natural resource managers face is protecting wildlife while mitigating climate change—as through forest carbon storage—to the greatest extent possible. But in some ecosystems, habitat restoration for imperiled species may be incompatible with maximizing carbon storage. For example, promoting early successional forest conditions does not maximize stand-level carbon storage, whereas uniformly promoting high stocking or mature forest conditions in the name of carbon storage excludes species that require open or young stands. Here, we briefly review the literature regarding carbon and wildlife trade-offs and then explore four case...
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