Western Mountain Initiative: Southern Rocky Mountains
Mountain ecosystems of the western U.S. provide irreplaceable goods and services such as water, wood, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities, but their potential responses to projected climatic patterns are poorly understood. The overarching objective of the Western Mountain Initiative (WMI) is to understand and predict the responses—emphasizing sensitivities, thresholds, resistance, and resilience—of western mountain ecosystems to climatic variability and change.
The WMI - Southern Rocky Mountains project, with diverse research partners, works on forests in the Southwest to: 1) elucidate centennial- to millennial-length shifts in past vegetation and fire regimes; 2) study responses of fire to short-term (annual to decadal) climatic variation; 3) determine drivers of tree mortality, including drought-stress thresholds for dieback; 4) assess patterns of post-disturbance ecosystem recovery; and 5) understand the joint effects of climatic variability, fire, and land use on watershed runoff and erosion processes.
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
Below are publications associated with this project.
Statement of Dr. Craig D. Allen, U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, 17 August 2012
The macroecology of sustainability
Soil C and N patterns in a semiarid piñon-juniper woodland: Topography of slope and ephemeral channels add to canopy-intercanopy heterogeneity
Extended megadroughts in the southwestern United States during Pleistocene interglacials
Salvage logging versus the use of burnt wood as a nurse object to promote post-fire tree seedling establishment
Millennial precipitation reconstruction for the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico, reveals changing drought signal
A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests
Forest responses to increasing aridity and warmth in the southwestern United States
Growth, carbon-isotope discrimination, and drought-associated mortality across a Pinus ponderosa elevational transect
Climate-induced forest dieback: An escalating global phenomenon?
Historical and modern disturbance regimes, stand structures, and landscape dynamics in piñon-juniper vegetation of the western United States
Tree die-off in response to global change-type drought: Mortality insights from a decade of plant water potential measurements
Mountain ecosystems of the western U.S. provide irreplaceable goods and services such as water, wood, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities, but their potential responses to projected climatic patterns are poorly understood. The overarching objective of the Western Mountain Initiative (WMI) is to understand and predict the responses—emphasizing sensitivities, thresholds, resistance, and resilience—of western mountain ecosystems to climatic variability and change.
The WMI - Southern Rocky Mountains project, with diverse research partners, works on forests in the Southwest to: 1) elucidate centennial- to millennial-length shifts in past vegetation and fire regimes; 2) study responses of fire to short-term (annual to decadal) climatic variation; 3) determine drivers of tree mortality, including drought-stress thresholds for dieback; 4) assess patterns of post-disturbance ecosystem recovery; and 5) understand the joint effects of climatic variability, fire, and land use on watershed runoff and erosion processes.
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
Below are publications associated with this project.