The 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens damaged or destroyed vegetation on more than 66,100 hectares (270,000 acres) within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The effects of the eruption on planting sites and seedling performance were unknown. Regeneration of "cut over" lands near Mount St. Helens has historically been limited...
Two forest management objectives being debated in the context of federally managed landscapes in the US Pacific Northwest involve a perceived trade-off between fire restoration and C sequestration. The former strategy would reduce fuel (and therefore C) that has accumulated through a century of fire suppression and exclusion that has...
As concern over global warming intensifies, sequestration and storage of atmospheric CO2 has become an important scientific and policy issue. Confusion persists, however, over interpretation of forest carbon (C) source-sink dynamics, in part because conclusions drawn depend on temporal and spatial scales of analysis (e.g. day-week
scale vs. successional-scale), type...
Changes in climate caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s atmosphere have led land and ocean surface temperatures to increase by 0.85°C and sea level to increase by 19 cm relative to preindustrial times. Global climate change will lead to further alterations in mean temperature and...
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Mark E. Harmon
Changes in climate caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2
Fire is a fundamental disturbance that drives terrestrial and atmospheric carbon dynamics. Previous studies have quantified fire effects on carbon cycling from local to global scales but have focused nearly exclusively on high-severity, stand-replacement fire. Since 2002, variable-severity wildfires have burned more than 65 000 ha across the east slope...
Quantifying and modeling processes involved in the global carbon cycle is important to evaluate the temporal and spatial variability of these processes and understand the effect of this variability on future response to changing climate and land use patterns. Biomass accumulation and Net Primary Productivity (NPP) are large components of...
Adaptive ecosystem management is a new paradigm for managing federal forests which requires regular monitoring of ecosystem function and diversity to measure the effects of management. Managers need new strategies and tools to help them assess their progress in maintaining healthy, productive and biologically diverse forests. Biomonitoring of select forest...
In order to investigate potential climate impacts on landscape-scale ecosystem processes, I implemented a dynamic general vegetation model (DGVM) over a large domain in northern California and western Nevada on a rectangular grid of ca. 800-meter spatial resolution. I used 100 years of observed, monthly climate and nine future climate...
This study examined the effect of fire regime on coarse woody debris (CWD) mass using a combination of field data and modeling. The objectives were to use field sampling to determine how CWD differs between two areas that have had different fire regimes, and investigate how fire frequency and severity,...
Background information is presented that provides historical perspectives on the field of mycology in the Pacific Northwest and its role in forest management. The series of events and decisions that have led to previous studies (or lack of studies) in the field also dictate the directions of current research. Culture,...