Publications
Listed here are publications, reports and articles by the Climate R&D program.
Filter Total Items: 1020
Long-term persistence and fire resilience of oak shrubfields in dry conifer forests of northern New Mexico
Extensive high-severity fires are creating large shrubfields in many dry conifer forests of the interior western USA, raising concerns about forest-to-shrub conversion. This study evaluates the role of disturbance in shrubfield formation, maintenance and succession in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. We compared the environmental conditions of extant Gambel oak (Quercus gambelii) shrubfields with
Authors
Christopher H. Guiterman, Ellis Margolis, Craig D. Allen, Donald A. Falk, Thomas W. Swetnam
Characterizing interactions between fire and other disturbances and their impacts on tree mortality in western U.S. Forests
Increasing evidence that pervasive warming trends are altering disturbance regimes and their interactions with fire has generated substantial interest and debate over the implications of these changes. Previous work has primarily focused on conditions that promote non-additive interactions of linked and compounded disturbances, but the spectrum of potential interaction patterns has not been fully
Authors
Jeffrey M. Kane, J. Morgan Varner, Margaret R. Metz, Phillip J. van Mantgem
Oxygen stable isotopic disparities among sympatric small land snail species from northwest Minnesota, USA
The oxygen isotopic composition (δ18O) of land snail shells can be a valuable paleoenvironmental archive if the climatic parameters that influence the isotopic system are fully understood. Previous calibration studies have examined a limited number of species or individuals, and most have focused on larger (> 10 mm) taxa, which do not represent the dominant shell material in the Quaternary fossil
Authors
Yurena Yanes, Jeffrey C. Nekola, Jason A. Rech, Jeffery S. Pigati
Increasing floodplain connectivity through urban stream restoration increases nutrient and sediment retention
Stream restoration practices frequently aim to increase connectivity between the stream channel and its floodplain to improve channel stability and enhance water quality through sediment trapping and nutrient retention. To measure the effectiveness of restoration and to understand the drivers of these functional responses, we monitored five restored urban streams that represent a range of channel
Authors
Sara K. McMillan, Gregory Noe
A method for quantifying cloud immersion in a tropical mountain forest using time-lapse photography
Quantifying the frequency, duration, and elevation range of fog or cloud immersion is essential to estimate cloud water deposition in water budgets and to understand the ecohydrology of cloud forests. The goal of this study was to develop a low-cost and high spatial-coverage method to detect occurrence of cloud immersion within a mountain cloud forest by using time-lapse photography. Trail cameras
Authors
Maoya Bassiouni, Martha A. Scholl, Angel J. Torres-Sanchez, Sheila F. Murphy
Continuously amplified warming in the Alaskan Arctic: Implications for estimating global warming hiatus
Historically, in situ measurements have been notoriously sparse over the Arctic. As a consequence, the existing gridded data of surface air temperature (SAT) may have large biases in estimating the warming trend in this region. Using data from an expanded monitoring network with 31 stations in the Alaskan Arctic, we demonstrate that the SAT has increased by 2.19°C in this region, or at a rate of 0
Authors
Kang Wang, Tingjun Zhang, Xiangdong Zhang, Gary D. Clow, Elchin E. Jafarov, Irina Overeem, Vladimir Romanovsky, Xiaoqing Peng, Bin Cao
Measuring the role of seagrasses in regulating sediment surface elevation
Seagrass meadows provide numerous ecosystem services and their rapid global loss may reduce human welfare as well as ecological integrity. In common with the other ‘blue carbon’ habitats (mangroves and tidal marshes) seagrasses are thought to provide coastal defence and encourage sediment stabilisation and surface elevation. A sophisticated understanding of sediment elevation dynamics in mangroves
Authors
Maria Potouroglou, James C. Bull, Ken W. Krauss, Hilary A. Kennedy, Marco Fusi, Daniele Daffonchio, Mwita M. Mangora, Michael N. Githaiga, Karen Diele, Mark Huxham
What mediates tree mortality during drought in the southern Sierra Nevada?
Severe drought has the potential to cause selective mortality within a forest, thereby inducing shifts in forest species composition. The southern Sierra Nevada foothills and mountains of California have experienced extensive forest dieback due to drought stress and insect outbreak. We used high-fidelity imaging spectroscopy (HiFIS) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) from the Carnegie Airborn
Authors
Tarin Paz-Kagan, Philip Brodrick, Nicholas R. Vaughn, Adrian J. Das, Nathan L. Stephenson, Koren R. Nydick, Gregory P. Asner
A record of change - Science and elder observations on the Navajo Nation
A Record of Change - Science and Elder Observations on the Navajo Nation is a 25-minute documentary about combining observations from Navajo elders with conventional science to determine how tribal lands and culture are affected by climate change. On the Navajo Nation, there is a shortage of historical climate data, making it difficult to assess changing environmental conditions.This video reveals
Authors
Margaret M. Hiza-Redsteer, Stephen M. Wessells
The Great Acceleration and the disappearing surficial geologic record
The surficial geologic record is the relatively thin veneer of young (<~1 Ma) and mostly unconsolidated sediments that cover portions of Earth’s terrestrial surface (Fig. 1). Once largely ignored as “overburden” by geologists, surficial deposits are now studied to address a wide range of issues related to the sustainability of human societies. Geologists use surficial deposits to determine the fre
Authors
Jason A. Rech, Kathleen B. Springer, Jeffrey S. Pigati
Fatal attraction? Intraguild facilitation and suppression among predators
Competition and suppression are recognized as dominant forces that structure predator communities. Facilitation via carrion provisioning, however, is a ubiquitous interaction among predators that could offset the strength of suppression. Understanding the relative importance of these positive and negative interactions is necessary to anticipate community-wide responses to apex predator declines an
Authors
Kelly J. Sivy, Casey B. Pozzanghera, James B. Grace, Laura R. Prugh
Assessing coastal wetland vulnerability to sea-level rise along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast: Gaps and opportunities for developing a coordinated regional sampling network
Coastal wetland responses to sea-level rise are greatly influenced by biogeomorphic processes that affect wetland surface elevation. Small changes in elevation relative to sea level can lead to comparatively large changes in ecosystem structure, function, and stability. The surface elevation table-marker horizon (SET-MH) approach is being used globally to quantify the relative contributions of pro
Authors
Michael J. Osland, Kereen T. Griffith, Jack C. Larriviere, Laura C. Feher, Donald R. Cahoon, Nicholas M. Enwright, David A. Oster, John M. Tirpak, Mark S. Woodrey, Renee C. Collini, Joseph J. Baustian, Joshua L. Breithaupt, Julia A Cherry, Jeremy R. Conrad, Nicole Cormier, Carlos A. Coronado-Molina, Joseph F. Donoghue, Sean A. Graham, Jennifer W. Harper, Mark W. Hester, Rebecca J. Howard, Ken W. Krauss, Daniel Kroes, Robert R. Lane, Karen L. McKee, Irving A. Mendelssohn, Beth A. Middleton, Jena A. Moon, Sarai Piazza, Nicole M. Rankin, Fred H. Sklar, Gregory D. Steyer, Kathleen M. Swanson, Christopher M. Swarzenski, William Vervaeke, Jonathan M Willis, K. Van Wilson