Earth’s atmosphere is unequivocally warming due to CO₂ and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities and this is having widespread impacts on forest ecosystems that provide important services to human societies. Forest ecosystems help regulate atmospheric CO2 concentrations by sequestering carbon in tree biomass and soils, which is...
American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are considered an indicator species of climate change. Adaptations for cold climates and active winters make pikas particularly sensitive to increasing temperatures. This, combined with evidence that multiple historically occupied populations have been extirpated within the past century, contributed to American pikas becoming a focal species...
The western United States is experiencing significant changes in wildfire and snow regimes as a result of warming temperatures. An amplification of wildfire activity and reduction in snow water equivalent, snow covered area, and earlier spring snowmelt are documented trends that are projected to continue into the future. With an...
The over-arching theme of this work is that soil data affect the performance and realism of vegetation models with particular focus on their ability to predict or explain disturbances such as fire or disease. We tested the sensitivity of the Excel version of the 3-PG model to soil properties and...
Understanding the tradeoff between water use and productivity is critical for modeling growth of intensively managed Douglas-fir forests in the Pacific Northwest. Evapotranspiration is closely linked to carbon dioxide intake during the process of photosynthesis. However, summer drought characterizing the growing season in this region imposes a limit on carbon...
Red fir (Abies magnifica) is a high elevation conifer generally growing between an altitude of 1,400 and 2,700 meters. In California, red fir grows in the Sierra Nevada, the Klamath Mountains, the eastern edges of the northern Californian Coast Ranges, and in the southern Cascades. Red fir commonly grows in...
Species' distributions across the landscape are perhaps the least understood yet most conspicuous features of life on earth. Ecologists have long studied species' distributions; yet, many questions remain about why species occur where they do. Such questions persist largely because species' distributions are complex systems with challenging properties like non-linearity,...