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Human activities have caused the decline of numerous species and ecosystems. To promote ecosystem resilience, recent management efforts aim to maintain ecosystem patterns and processes within their historical range of variability. There has been substantial concern that quaking aspen, the most widely distributed tree in North America and the most important deciduous tree in the subalpine forests of the Rocky Mountains, has declined significantly in the western landscape during the 20th century. This reported decline has been attributed to conifer encroachment associated with fire exclusion, as well as other causes. To assess long-term changes in the extent of quaking aspen in a 175000-ha study area in western Colorado,...
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Historical disturbance regimes are often considered a critical element in maintaining native plant communities. However, the response of plant communities to disturbance may be fundamentally altered as a consequence of invasive plants, climate change, or prior disturbances. The appropriateness of historical disturbance patterns under modern conditions and the interactions among disturbances are issues that ecologists must address to protect and restore native plant communities. We evaluated the response of Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis (Beetle & A. Young) S.L. Welsh plant communities to their historical disturbance regime compared to other disturbance regimes. The historical disturbance regime of these...
Fire is known to structure tree populations, but the role of broad-scale climate variability is less clear. For example, the influence of climatic ?teleconnections? (the relationship between oceanic?atmospheric fluctuations and anomalous weather patterns across broad scales) on forest age structure is relatively unexplored. We sampled semiarid pi�on?juniper (Pinus edulis?Juniperus osteosperma) woodlands in western Colorado, USA, to test the hypothesis that woodland age structures are shaped by climate, including links to oceanic?atmospheric fluctuations, and by past fires and livestock grazing. Low-severity surface fire was lacking, as fire scars were absent, and did not influence woodland densities, but stand-replacing...
We investigated experimental warming and simulated grazing (clipping) effects on rangeland quality, as indicated by vegetation production and nutritive quality, in winter-grazed meadows and summer-grazed shrublands on the Tibetan Plateau, a rangeland system experiencing climatic and pastoral land use changes. Warming decreased total aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) by 40 g.m?�.yr?� at the meadow habitats and decreased palatable ANPP (total ANPP minus non-palatable forb ANPP) by 10 g.m?�.yr?� at both habitats. The decreased production of the medicinal forb Gentiana straminea and the increased production of the non-palatable forb Stellera chamaejasme with warming also reduced rangeland quality. At the shrubland...
Mountain streams provide important habitats for many species, but their faunas are especially vulnerable to climate change because of ectothermic physiologies and movements that are constrained to linear networks that are easily fragmented. Effectively conserving biodiversity in these systems requires accurate downscaling of climatic trends to local habitat conditions, but downscaling is difficult in complex terrains given diverse microclimates and mediation of stream heat budgets by local conditions. We compiled a stream temperature database (n = 780) for a 2500-km river network in central Idaho to assess possible trends in summer temperatures and thermal habitat for two native salmonid species from 1993 to 2006....
In the northern Colorado Front Range, fire suppression during the 20th century is believed to have created a high hazard of catastrophic fire in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests. Since the early 1990s, resource managers have increased the use of prescribed fires to re-create fire regimes and forest structures similar to those of the pre-Euro-American settlement period in order both to reduce fire hazard and to improve forest health. To improve understanding of historical fire regimes, we conducted a study of fire history along an elevational gradient from \sim1830 to 2800 m in ponderosa pine forests in the northern Front Range. Fire-scar dates were determined from 525 partial cross sections from living and...
Flow regulation has reduced the exchange of water, energy, and materials between rivers and floodplains, caused declines in native plant populations, and advanced the spread of nonnative plants. Naturalized flow regimes are regarded as a means to restore degraded riparian areas. We examined the effects of flood regime (short [SIFI] vs. long [LIFI] inter-flood interval) on plant community and soil inorganic nitrogen (N) dynamics in riparian forests dominated by native Populus deltoides var. wislizenii Eckenwalder (Rio Grande cottonwood) and nonnative Tamarix chinensis Lour. (salt cedar) along the regulated middle Rio Grande of New Mexico. The frequency of inundation (every 2–3 years) at SIFI sites better reflected...
We evaluated the relationship between annual forage production and annual and seasonal precipitation and temperature at a shortgrass steppe site in north-central Colorado using a long-term data set (52 yr). We also constructed a relationship between forage production and aboveground net primary production (ANPP). Precipitation fluctuated randomly, but temperature had clear warming and cooling trends including a 17-yr warming trend from 1974 to 1990. Forage production was significantly related to both annual and seasonal precipitation but not temperature. Precipitation events between 15 and 30 mm accounted for most of the variability in production because they accounted for most of the variability in precipitation...
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The importance of efficaciously assessing the risk for introduction and establishment of pest species is an increasingly important ecological and economic issue. Evaluation of climate is fundamental to determining the potential success of an introduced or invasive insect pest. However, evaluating climatic suitability poses substantial difficulties; climate can be measured and assessed in a bewildering array of ways. Some physiological filter, in essence a lens that focuses climate through the requirements and constraints of a potential pest introduction, is required. Difficulties in assessing climate suitability are further exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar L.) is an exotic,...
Piñon pine and juniper woodlands in the southwestern United States are often represented as an expanding and even invasive vegetation type, a legacy of historic grazing, and culpable in the degradation of western rangelands. A long-standing emphasis on forage production, in combination with recent hazard fuel concerns, has prompted a new era of woodland management with stated restoration objectives. Yet the extent and dynamics of piñon-juniper communities that predate intensive Euro-American settlement activities are poorly known or understood, while the intrinsic ecological, aesthetic, and economic values of old-growth woodlands are often overlooked. Historical changes in piñon-juniper stands include two related,...
In British Columbia, Canada, management efforts used to control mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) outbreaks have included treatment of infested trees with an organic arsenic pesticide, monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA). Cumulative pesticide applications over a large geographic area have generated concerns about arsenic loading in the environment and potential toxicity to nontarget wildlife. We investigated woodpecker foraging patterns in infested stands with and without MSMA treatment using a combination of tree debarking indices, point count surveys, and radiotelemetry methods in addition to insect flight traps to measure mountain pine beetle emergence. Debarking indices indicated woodpecker...
Fire is known to structure tree populations, but the role of broad-scale climate variability is less clear. For example, the influence of climatic ?teleconnections? (the relationship between oceanic?atmospheric fluctuations and anomalous weather patterns across broad scales) on forest age structure is relatively unexplored. We sampled semiarid pi�on?juniper (Pinus edulis?Juniperus osteosperma) woodlands in western Colorado, USA, to test the hypothesis that woodland age structures are shaped by climate, including links to oceanic?atmospheric fluctuations, and by past fires and livestock grazing. Low-severity surface fire was lacking, as fire scars were absent, and did not influence woodland densities, but stand-replacing...
Invasion by nonnative brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) often results in replacement of cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki) in the inland western United States, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We conducted a four-year removal experiment to test for population-level mechanisms (i.e., changes in recruitment, survival, emigration, and immigration) promoting invasion success of brook trout and causing decline of native Colorado River cutthroat trout (O. c. pleuriticus). We chose 700–1200 m segments of four small mountain streams where brook trout had recently invaded cutthroat trout populations, two each at mid elevation (2500–2700 m) and high elevation (3150–3250 m), and annually removed...
We used multiscale plots to sample vascular plant diversity and soil characteristics in and adjacent to 26 long-term grazing exclosure sites in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota, USA. The exclosures were 7?60 yr old (31.2 � 2.5 yr, mean � 1 se). Plots were also randomly placed in the broader landscape in open rangeland in the same vegetation type at each site to assess spatial variation in grazed landscapes. Consistent sampling in the nine National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and other management units yielded data from 78 1000-m2 plots and 780 1-m2 subplots. We hypothesized that native species richness would be lower in the exclosures than in grazed sites, due to competitive exclusion in the absence of...
Ecologists increasingly use plot-scale data to inform research and policy related to regional and global environmental change. For soil chemistry research, scaling from the plot to the region is especially difficult due to high spatial variability at all scales. We used a hierarchical Bayesian model of plot-scale soil nutrient pools to predict storage of soil organic carbon (oC), inorganic carbon (iC), total nitrogen (N), and available phosphorus (avP) in a 7962-km2 area including the Phoenix, Arizona, USA, metropolitan area and its desert and agricultural surroundings. The Bayesian approach was compared to a traditional approach that multiplied mean values for urban mesic residential, urban xeric residential, nonresidential...
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The intense demand for river water in arid regions is resulting in widespread changes in riparian vegetation. We present a direct gradient method to predict the vegetation change resulting from a proposed upstream dam or diversion. Our method begins with the definition of vegetative cover types, based on a census of the existing vegetation in a set of 1 x 2 m plots. A hydraulic model determines the discharge necessary to inundate each plot. We use the hydrologic record, as defined by a flow duration curve, to determine the inundation duration for each plot. This allows us to position cover types along a gradient of inundation duration. A change in river management results in a new flow duration curve, which is used...
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Significant ecological, hydrologic, and geomorphic changes have occurred during the 20th century along many large floodplain rivers in the American Southwest. Native Populus forests have declined, while the exotic Eurasian shrub, Tamarix, has proliferated and now dominates most floodplain ecosystems. Photographs from late 19th and early 20th centuries illustrate wide river channels with largely bare in-channel landforms and shrubby higher channel margin floodplains. However, by the mid-20th century, floodplains supporting dense Tamarix stands had expanded, and river channels had narrowed. Along the lower Green River in eastern Utah, the causal mechanism of channel and floodplain changes remains ambiguous due to...
Two populations of boreal toads (Bufo boreas) experienced drastic declines in abundance in the late 1990s. Evidence supported the hypothesis of disease (the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) as the cause of these declines, but other hypotheses had not been evaluated. We used an 11-year capture-recapture data set to evaluate weather and disease as causes of these declines. We developed sets of mathematical models that reflected hypothesized relationships between several weather variables and annual survival rates of adult males in these populations. In addition, models that reflected the possibility that the declines were caused by an introduced fungus were developed. All models were fit to the data...
Encroachment of woody plants into grasslands, and subsequent brush management, are among the most prominent changes to occur in arid and semiarid systems over the past century. Despite the resulting widespread changes in landcover, substantial uncertainty about the biogeochemical impacts of woody proliferation and brush management exists. We explored the role of shrub encroachment and brush management on leaf litter decomposition in a semidesert grassland where velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina) abundance has increased over the past 100 years. This change in physiognomy may affect decomposition directly, through altered litter quality or quantity, and indirectly through altered canopy structure. To assess the direct...
In the spring of 1996, a nine-day test flood from Glen Canyon Dam involved the deepest and largest hypolimnetic withdrawals from the penstocks and the river outlet works (ROW) since 1986, interacting with ongoing hydrodynamic and stratification patterns to enhance freshening of the hypolimnion of Lake Powell reservoir and its tailwaters. Prior to the test flood, a six-year drought had produced a pronounced meromictic hypolimnion that was weakening from high inflow events in 1993 and 1995. Hypoxia, however, had continued to increase in the deepest portions of the reservoir. Over the course of the test flood, 0.893 km3 were released from the ports located at and below the hypolimnetic chemocline. The increased discharge...
map background search result map search result map Interaction of historical and nonhistorical disturbances maintains native plant communities Processes of Tamarix invasion and floodplain development along the lower Green River, Utah. Relating Riparian Vegetation to Present and Future Streamflows Risk assessment in the face of a changing environment: gypsy moth and climate change in Utah. Relating Riparian Vegetation to Present and Future Streamflows Interaction of historical and nonhistorical disturbances maintains native plant communities Processes of Tamarix invasion and floodplain development along the lower Green River, Utah. Risk assessment in the face of a changing environment: gypsy moth and climate change in Utah.