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Climate Effects and Adaption in Forests
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Dr. Christopher J. Fettig, Dr. Maria K. Janowiak, and Dr. Jessica E. Halofsky discuss how climate change driven increases in temperature and variation in precipitation are impacting U.S. forests and the wide range of ecosystem services they provide, sharing opportunities to proactively address risks to forests, and providing concrete examples of adaptation strategies and tactics that can be leveraged by the federal government and private landowners.
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News and Webinars
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Webinars
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Workshops Introduce New Way to Evaluate Changes to Benefits of Nature
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The Appalachian LCC and the U.S. Forest Service held its initial workshops introducing a new way of evaluating ecosystem change and resilience via the Landscape Dynamics Assessment Tool (LanDAT).
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News & Events
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AppLCC/USFS Landscape Dynamics Assessment Tool Workshop
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The Appalachian LCC and the U.S. Forest Service wish to invite you to attend or nominate a representative to attend a 1-day hands-on roll-out of the Landscape Dynamics Assessment Tool.
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News & Events
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Events
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Tools and Resources for Addressing Energy Development in the Appalachians
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On July 20, Jessica Rhodes of the Appalachian LCC gave an in-depth presentation to the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture (AMJV) community on LCC-funded tools and resources that can address potential impacts of various energy development technologies on birds and other wildlife.
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News & Events
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Understanding Ecosystem Services from a Geosciences Perspective
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Assessment of ecosystem services—the benefits society receives from ecosystems—can be improved by including broader spatial and temporal scales of geosciences perspectives.
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News & Events
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"Ecosystem Benefits and Risks" Research and Website Support Natural Resource Management across the Appalachians
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The Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) and the U.S. Forest Service are releasing products from the first phase of an ongoing study assessing benefits of and risks to the region's "ecosystem services" -- natural assets valued by people such as clean drinking water, outdoor recreation, forest products, and biological conservation.
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News & Events
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Applying LCC Tools to Issues Impacting the Keystone State
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Pennsylvania is a landscape filled with abundant forests and wildlife, thousands of miles of rivers and streams, and home to a productive energy industry that includes the emergence of natural gas and alternative energy sources. Natural resource agencies and conservation organizations increasingly see the value for proactive science and tools that help inform decisions both locally and regionally in order to best protect and conserve the lands, waters, and wildlife of the state while harnessing resources that benefit society and the economy.
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News & Events
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Palaeodata-informed modelling of large carbon losses from recent burning of boreal forests
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Wildfires play a key role in the boreal forest carbon cycle(1,2), and models suggest that accelerated burning will increase boreal C emissions in the coming century (3). However, these predictions may be compromised because brief observational records provide limited constraints to model initial conditions (4). We confronted this limitation by using palaeoenvironmental data to drive simulations of long-term C dynamics in the Alaskan bo- real forest. Results show that fire was the dominant control on C cycling over the past millennium, with changes in fire frequency accounting for 84% of C stock variability. A recent rise in fire frequency inferred from the palaeorecord5 led to simulated C losses of 1.4 kg C m?2(12% of ecosystem C stocks) from 1950 to 2006. In stark contrast, a small net C sink of 0.3 kg C m?2 occurred if the past fire regime was assumed to be similar to the modern regime, as is common in models of C dynamics. Although boreal fire regimes are heterogeneous, recent trends6 and future projections (7) point to increasing fire activity in response to climate warming throughout the biome. Thus, predictions (8) that terrestrial C sinks of northern high latitudes will mitigate rising atmospheric CO2 may be over-optimistic.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Significant anthropogenic-induced changes of climate classes since 1950
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Anthropogenic forcings have contributed to global and regional warming in the last few decades and likely affected terrestrial precipitation. Here we examine changes in major Köppen climate classes from gridded observed data and their uncertainties due to internal climate variability using control simulations from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5). About 5.7% of the global total land area has shifted toward warmer and drier climate types from 1950–2010, and significant changes include expansion of arid and high-latitude continental climate zones, shrinkage in polar and midlatitude continental climates, poleward shifts in temperate, continental and polar climates, and increasing average elevation of tropical and polar climates. Using CMIP5 multi-model averaged historical simulations forced by observed anthropogenic and natural, or natural only, forcing components, we find that these changes of climate types since 1950 cannot be explained as natural variations but are driven by anthropogenic factors.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Experimental studies of dead-wood biodiversity — A review identifying global gaps in knowledge
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The importance of dead wood for biodiversity is widely recognized but strategies for conservation exist only in some regions worldwide. Most strategies combine knowledge from observational and experimental studies but remain preliminary as many facets of the complex relationships are unstudied. In this first global review of 79 experimental studies addressing biodiversity patterns in dead wood, we identify major knowledge gaps and aim to foster collaboration among researchers by providing a map of previous and ongoing experiments. We show that research has focused primarily on temperate and boreal forests, where results have helped in developing evidence-based conservation strategies, whereas comparatively few such efforts have been made in subtropical or tropical zones. Most studies have been limited to early stages of wood decomposition and many diverse and functionally important saproxylic taxa, e.g., fungi, flies and termites, remain under-represented. Our meta-analysis confirms the benefits of dead-wood addition for biodiversity, particularly for saproxylic taxa, but shows that responses of non-saproxylic taxa are heterogeneous. Our analysis indicates that global conservation of organisms associated with dead wood would benefit most by prioritizing research in the tropics and other neglected regions, focusing on advanced stages of wood decomposition and assessing a wider range of taxa. By using existing experimental set-ups to study advanced decay stages and additional taxa, results could be obtained more quickly and with less effort compared to initiating new experiments.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
