Forest managers are faced with balancing a multitude of management objectives including social, economic, and ecological drivers as well as the uncertainty of how forests will grow and react to climate change. One possible tool to balance these drivers and the uncertainty of climate change is an adaptive management framework...
Estimates of potential carbon (C) storage can be used to constrain predictions of future carbon sequestration and to understand the degree to which disturbances, both natural aid anthropogenic, affect C storage. An upper bound on C storage in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States was estimated using field...
The rapid accumulation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste caused by disposable plastic water bottle use is a worldwide problem that will continue to affect our environment, economy and society unless new methods of reduction and degradation are explored. The large amounts of energy and resources that are required during...
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
Plant litter decomposition plays an important role in the global carbon cycle, and contributes large amounts of carbon to soils, which store more carbon than any other terrestrial pool of organic matter. Decomposition plays a fundamental role in nutrient cycling and alters soil properties that shape plant community composition and...
This thesis examines the Schultz Fire as a case study to explain the complex history of fire suppression management in America’s forests, and to gain further understanding of how management practices have affected the increase in fire severity levels and how forests respond to such a disturbance. The thesis objectives...
Ecosystems are highly heterogeneous systems subjected to important levels of environmental variability; however, it is common in terrestrial biogeochemical models to assume homogeneous properties of the elements of the system or constant environmental conditions. For some processes, heterogeneity in these models is treated very simplistically, but there is not much...
Concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere has increased over the past 150 years. Because CO₂ is one of a number of radiatively active gases, there is concern that global temperatures will rise and climatic conditions will change. Recent research indicates northern hemisphere forests may currently be accumulating carbon...
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...
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,...
