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Dylan Schwilk

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Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response
The sky island forests of the southwestern United States are one of the most diverse temperate forest ecosystems in the world, providing key habitat for migrating and residential species alike. Black bear, bighorn sheep, mule deer, and wild turkey are just a few of the species found in these isolated mountain ecosystems that rise out of the desert landscape. However, recent droughts have crippled these ecosystems, causing significant tree death. Climate predictions suggest that this region will only face hotter and drier conditions in the future, potentially stressing these ecosystems even further. Simple models predict that vegetation will move to cooler and wetter locations in response to this warming. However,...
Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11258-016-0568-y): Resprouting is a key functional trait for species in disturbance prone environments. In many semi-arid environments, woody plants face both fire and drought as recurring disturbances. Past work has demonstrated that oaks inhabiting sky-island forests of the northern Sierra Madre Oriental have differing microhabitat preferences and heavy stem dieback occured during the historic 2011 drought indicating potential xylem failure. These oak species, representing two sections within the genus, are all post-fire resprouters: they can resprout from underground storage organs when fire kills above ground tissue. Resprouts provide an opportunity to...
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Past and Future Climate Reconstructions for the Chisos, Davis and Guadalupe Mountains, Texas, USA
Climate summary variables reconstructed in high resolution for past and projected futures. We took detailed microclimate measurements across three mountain ranges in West Texas to identify key topographical drivers of microclimate variation, and modeled future fine scale climate as a function of topography and projected regional weather across multiple future scenarios.
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Topographic predictors of local microclimate that that were derived from ASTER 30-m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) data from gdex.cr.usgs.gov/gdex/ and clipped to selected 12-digit hydrologic units that included ibutton sensor locations and adjacent hydrologic units in each mountain range.
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Topographic predictors of local microclimate that that were derived from ASTER 30-m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) data from gdex.cr.usgs.gov/gdex/ and clipped to selected 12-digit hydrologic units that included ibutton sensor locations and adjacent hydrologic units in each mountain range.
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