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LANDFIRE Data Applications for Research in Fire Ecology, Forest Mgmt in California
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Brandon Collins presents the second in a series of webinars that LANDFIRE co-hosts with the California Fire Science Consortium. Collins is a USFS Research Forester based in Davis, CA, whose interests involve characterizing effects of fire and fuels treatments on forests at both the stand and landscape levels. He says, "My research intends to provide meaningful information to managers interested in improving forest resiliency and incorporating more natural fire-vegetation dynamics across landscapes."
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Training
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Videos and Webinars
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Laurent, Ed
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Expertise Search
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Lee, Danny
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Danny is Director of the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center of the USDA Forest Service's Southern Research Station in Asheville, NC. He lead a diverse team of reearchers working to develop tools and information needed to detect, assess, and predict environmental treats to eastern forests.
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Expertise Search
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Lock Haven, Nature Conservancy Protect 5,200 Acres in Conservation Effort
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Lock Haven City Authority, as a partner in The Nature Conservancy’s Working Woodlands Program, agrees to forever protect and sustainably manage its forest and freshwater resources.
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News & Events
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Longleaf Pine Restoration Cost Share Applications Available to Landowners
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The Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division (WFF) of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR) is currently accepting applications through its Landowner Incentive Program (LIP) to continue longleaf pine restoration efforts in Alabama. The grant was awarded through a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and will be made available to qualifying landowners for longleaf pine restoration on private lands.
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News & Events
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Managing Urban Forests in a Changing Climate
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Register now to learn how you can help your urban forest and your community prepare for the effects of climate change at The Morton Arboretum Urban Tree Conference, “Managing Urban Forests in a Changing Climate,” November 18 and 19, 2014, in Lisle, Illinois.
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News & Events
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Mapping tree density at a global scale
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The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well as the overwhelming effect of humans across most of the world. Based on our projected tree densities, we estimate that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Maryland's Trees Create a Truly Green Economy
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Like many other states, Maryland has an active forest markets industry. Working with private landowners to practice sustainable forest management is paying off in spades.
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News & Events
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Medieval warming initiated exceptionally large wildfire outbreaks in the Rocky Mountains
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Many of the largest wildfires in US history burned in recent decades, and climate change explains much of the increase in area burned. The frequency of extreme wildfire weather will increase with continued warming, but many uncertainties still exist about future fire regimes, including how the risk of large fires will persist as vegetation changes. Past fire-climate relationships provide an opportunity to constrain the related uncertainties, and reveal widespread burn- ing across large regions of western North America during past warm intervals. Whether such episodes also burned large portions of individual landscapes has been difficult to determine, however, because uncertainties with the ages of past fires and limited spatial resolution often prohibit specific estimates of past area burned. Accounting for these challenges in a subalpine landscape in Colorado, we estimated century-scale fire synchroneity across 12 lake- sediment charcoal records spanning the past 2,000 y. The percent- age of sites burned only deviated from the historic range of vari- ability during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) between 1,200 and 850 y B.P., when temperatures were similar to recent decades. Between 1,130 and 1,030 y B.P., 83% (median estimate) of our sites burned when temperatures increased ∼0.5 °C relative to the preceding centuries. Lake-based fire rotation during the MCA decreased to an estimated 120 y, representing a 260% higher rate of burning than during the period of dendroecological sampling (360 to −60 y B.P.). Increased burning, however, did not persist throughout the MCA. Burning declined abruptly before temperatures cooled, indicating possible fuel limitations to continued burning.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Multi-year drought-induced morbidity preceding tree death in Southeastern US forests
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Recent forest diebacks combined with threats of future drought focus attention on the extent to which tree death is caused by catastrophic events as opposed to chronic declines in health that accumulate over years. While recent attention has focused on large-scale diebacks, there is concern that increasing drought stress and chronic morbidity may have pervasive impacts on forest composition in many regions. Here we use long-term, whole-stand inventory data from Southeastern US forests to show that trees exposed to drought experience multi-year declines in growth prior to mortality. Following a severe, multi-year drought, 72% of trees that did not recover their pre-drought growth rates died within 10 years. This pattern was mediated by local moisture availability. As an index of morbidity prior to death, we calculated the difference in cumulative growth after drought relative to surviving conspecifics. The strength of drought-induced morbidity varied among species and was correlated with drought tolerance. These findings support the ability of trees to avoid death during drought events but indicate shifts that could occur over decades. Tree mortality following drought is predictable in these ecosystems based on growth declines, highlighting an opportunity to address multi-year drought-induced morbidity in models, experiments, and management decisions.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
