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Droughts and insect outbreaks are primary disturbance processes linking climate change to tree mortality in western North America. Refugia from these disturbances—locations where impacts are less severe relative to the surrounding landscape—may be priorities for conservation, restoration, and monitoring. In this study, hypotheses concerning physical and biological processes supporting refugia were investigated by modelling the landscape controls on disturbance refugia that were identified using remotely sensed vegetation indicators. Refugia were identified at 30-m resolution using anomalies of Landsat-derived Normalized Difference Moisture Index in lodgepole and whitebark pine forests in southern Oregon, USA, in...
Wood products provide a relatively long-term carbon storage mechanism. Due to lack of consistent datasets on these products, however, it is difficult to determine their carbon contents. The main purpose of this study was to quantify forest disturbance and timber product output (TPO) using time series Landsat observations for North Carolina. The results revealed that North Carolina had an average forest disturbance rate of 178,000 ha per year from 1985 to 2010. The derived disturbance products were found to be highly correlated with TPO survey data, explaining up to 87% of the total variance of county level industrial roundwood production. State level TPO estimates derived using the Landsat-based disturbance products...
The effect of tree canopy, understory, herbivores, and litter depth on seedling establishment, survival, and reproduction of the alien grass, Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), was examined in a series of experiments in four forest habitat types in western North America. Higher recruitment, survival, and reproduction on clearcuts, which would be expected if the overstory alone is limiting the distribution of cheatgrass in forests, were not observed. Removing the understory in an otherwise undisturbed Pinus ponderosa forest did, however, increase the emergence of B. tectorum, but plants in these experimentally-created openings were more vulnerable to grazing by small mammals. In contrast, removing the sparse understory...