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We developed a spatially explicit model that simulated future southern pine beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis, SPB) dynamics and pine forest management for a real landscape over 60 years to inform regional forest management. The SPB has a considerable effect on forest dynamics in the Southeastern United States, especially in loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) stands that are managed for timber production. Regional outbreaks of SPB occur in bursts resulting in elimination of entire stands and major economic loss. These outbreaks are often interspersed with decades of inactivity, making long-term modeling of SPB dynamics challenging. Forest management techniques, including thinning, have proven effective and are often recommended...
Abstract (from SpringerOpen): Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana, USA) have been immense in recent years, capturing the attention of resource managers, fire scientists, and the general public. This paper synthesizes understanding of the potential effects of changing climate and fire regimes on Pacific Northwest forests, including effects on disturbance and stress interactions, forest structure and composition, and post-fire ecological processes. We frame this information in a risk assessment context, and conclude with management implications and future research needs. Large and severe fires in the Pacific Northwest are associated with warm and dry conditions, and such...
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after wildfire by providing habitat and seed sources. With increasing fire activity, there is speculation that fire intensity and...
Wildfire refugia are forest patches that are minimally-impacted by fire and provide critical habitats for fire-sensitive species and seed sources for post-fire forest regeneration. Wildfire refugia are relatively understudied, particularly concerning the impacts of subsequent fires on existing refugia. We opportunistically re-visited 122 sites classified in 1994 for a prior fire refugia study, which were burned by two wildfires in 2012 in the Cascade mountains of central Washington, USA. We evaluated the fire effects for historically persistent fire refugia and compared them to the surrounding non-refugial forest matrix. Of 122 total refugial (43 plots) and non-refugial (79 plots) sites sampled following the 2012...
In the Southeastern U.S. rapid urbanization is a major challenge to developing long-term conservation strategies. The SAMBI DSL project used predicted urban growth models described herein to inform future landscape conditions that were also based climate change impacts and vegetative community succession. These future landscape conditions were then applied as a context for land use and management decisions in conservation planning. SLEUTH, named for the model input datasets (Slope, Land use, Excluded, Urban, Transportation and Hillshade) is the evolutionary product of the Clarke Urban Growth Model that uses cellular automata, terrain mapping and land cover change modeling to address urban growth (Jantz et al, 2009;...
Abstract (from http://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF16165): Interannual variability in burn severity is assessed across forested ecoregions of the western United States to understand how it is influenced by variations in area burned and climate during 1984–2014. Strong correlations (|r| > 0.6) between annual area burned and climate metrics were found across many of the studied regions. The burn severity of individual fires and fire seasons was weakly, but significantly (P < 0.05), correlated with burned area across many regions. Interannual variability in fuel dryness evaluated with fuel aridity metrics demonstrated weak-to-moderate (|r| >0.4) relationships with regional burn severity, congruent with but weaker than...
Managing ecosystems for resilience and sustainability requires understanding how they will respond to future anthropogenic drivers such as climate change and urbanization. In fire-dependent ecosystems, predicting this response requires a focus on how these drivers will impact fire regimes. Here, we use scenarios of climate change, urbanization and management to simulate the future dynamics of the critically endangered and fire-dependent longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystem. We investigated how climate change and urbanization will affect the ecosystem, and whether the two conservation goals of a 135% increase in total longleaf area and a doubling of fire-maintained open-canopy habitat can be achieved in the...
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Communities, resource managers, and decision makers in Arctic Alaska are in need of scientific information to base important decisions related to anticipating and adapting to changes in temperature and precipitation. Since its inception in 2011, the Alaska Climate Science Center (AK CSC) and its partners have produced a variety of scientific products and datasets aimed at supporting this need and increasing climate change resilience in the Arctic. However, much of the information related to these activities is dispersed across many technical publications, and is often not readily accessible to those outside the research community. In an effort to make this science more available and accessible, the AK CSC is working...
Abstract (from http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3955/046.089.0305): It is hypothesized that climate impacts forest mosaics through dynamic ecological processes such as wildfires. However, climate-fire research has primarily focused on understanding drivers of fire frequency and area burned, largely due to scale mismatches and limited data availability. Recent datasets, however, allow for the investigation of climate influences on ecological patch metrics across broad regions independent of area burned and at finer scale. One area of particular interest is the distribution of fire refugia within wildfire perimeters. Although much recent research emphasis has been placed on high-severity patches within wildfires,...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112716308532): Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover. Acquisition of pre- and post-fire Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data on the 2012 Pole Creek Fire in central Oregon provided an opportunity to isolate and quantify fire effects coincident with specific agents of change. This study characterizes the influence of pre-fire mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonus...
Abstract (from http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6f94/meta): High temperatures and severe drought contributed to extensive tree mortality from fires and bark beetles during the 2000s in parts of the western continental United States. Several states in this region have greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets and would benefit from information on the amount of carbon stored in tree biomass killed by disturbance. We quantified mean annual tree mortality from fires, bark beetles, and timber harvest from 2003–2012 for each state in this region. We estimated tree mortality from fires and beetles using tree aboveground carbon (AGC) stock and disturbance data sets derived largely from remote sensing. We...
As the Earth’s climate changed in the ancient past, many species moved across the landscape to track adequate environmental conditions. Some species took shelter in remaining pockets of suitable climates, referred to as refugia. For example, refugia harbored species when vast glaciers covered much of the land, allowing them to survive and migrate again across the landscape as temperatures warmed and ice melted. Modern changes in climate are similarly compelling species to move, and some of those species may seek shelter from increasingly hostile conditions in refugia. Modern climate refugia will likely take many different forms. For example, larger-scale macrorefugia may be areas of relative climate stability that...
This fact sheet was prepared by Jessica Halofsky, David Peterson and Brian Harvey, University of Washington, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Editorial assistance from Patti Loesche and Darcy Widmayer. Funding for this work provided by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. This fact sheets goes with the following synthesis paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8.
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...
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This dataset represents the extent of urbanization (for the year indicated) predicted by the model SLEUTH, developed by Dr. Keith C. Clarke, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Geography and modified by David I. Donato of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Eastern Geographic Science Center (EGSC). Further model modification and implementation was performed at the Biodiversity and Spatial Information Center at North Carolina State University. Purpose: Urban growth probability extents throughout the 21st century for the Southeast Regional Assessment Project, which encompasses the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee...
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Research has suggested that biochar soil amendments have the ability to improve soil water retention, but results have not been consistent or predictable across soil types. The objective of this project was to evaluate the potential for biochar soil amendments to mitigate agricultural drought by characterizing their impacts on soil hydraulics and plant growth across a range of agricultural soil conditions. This data set contains soil moisture retention curves and unsaturated hydraulic conductivities for four Oregon agricultural soils amended with biochar. Gasified biochars made from wheat straw (AgEnergy, Spokane, WA) and conifer wood (BioLogical, Philomath, OR) were tilled into soils at experimental stations in...
We established a Landsat-derived geospatial database of unburned islands within 2,298 fires across the Inland Northwestern US (including eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and Idaho) from 1984-2014. The detection of unburned areas within these fires is based upon a classification tree approach that uses two pre- and post-fire Landsat image pairs (see Meddens et al 2016 for details). The data set consist of unburned patches within each fire that are two pixels or larger. This database will be useful for identifying fire refugia, seed sources, and can be used as an overall metric of fire impacts across the northwestern US. (Meddens, A.J., Kolden, C.A., & Lutz, J.A. (2016). Detecting unburned areas within wildfire...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425716303261): Wildfires shape the distribution and structure of vegetation across the inland northwestern United States. However, fire activity is expected to increase given the current rate of climate change, with uncertain outcomes. A fire impact that has not been widely addressed is the development of unburned islands; areas within the fire perimeter that do not burn. These areas function as critical ecological refugia for biota during or following wildfires, but they have been largely ignored in methodological studies of remote sensing assessing fire severity under the assumption that they will be detected by algorithms for delineating fire...
Abstract (from Oxford Academic): Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales, and affected taxa, they have not been characterized systematically over space and time, which is crucial for understanding their role in facilitating resilience in the context of global change. We identify four dichotomies that delineate an overarching conceptual framework of fire refugia: unburned versus lower severity, species-specific versus landscape-process characteristics, predictable versus stochastic, and ephemeral versus persistent....
This repository contains source code for a set of decision support tools to be used for selecting a biochar type and application rate. The tool set includes: Biochar Property Explorer This tool allows users to compare the biochars in our database by graphing their physiochemical properties. We compiled laboratory- and commercially-produced biochars from PNW-relevant feedstocks and measured physiochemical properties related to fertilizer value, liming value, carbon sequestration, and particle size, following IBI-recommended protocols. These data are in the file BiocharData_PNWComputed.csv. Users can also enter test data for their own biochar to view its classification following the protocol developed by Camps Arbestain...
map background search result map search result map Data set for Developing Long-term Urbanization Scenarios for the Caribbean LCC as Part of the Southeast Regional Assessment Project A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Arctic Alaska Unburned areas within fire perimeters across the Inland Northwestern USA from 1984 to 2014 Macro and micro nutrient characteristics of four biochar-amended soils from Oregon, 2018 Macro and micro nutrient characteristics of four biochar-amended soils from Oregon, 2018 Unburned areas within fire perimeters across the Inland Northwestern USA from 1984 to 2014 Data set for Developing Long-term Urbanization Scenarios for the Caribbean LCC as Part of the Southeast Regional Assessment Project A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Arctic Alaska