Dying piñon pine (Pinus edulis) with orange needles, due to drought stress and associated bark beetle outbreak, Jemez Mtns., NM. October 2002.
The same view, with grey skeletons of dead piñon pines (Pinus edulis) after the needles have dropped, with surviving green junipers. May 2004.
Natural climatic variability, including episodic droughts, has long been known to trigger accelerated tree mortality in forests worldwide, including in the Southwest U.S. Scientific understanding of the process drivers and spatial patterns of tree mortality is surprisingly limited, constraining our ability to model forest responses to projected climate changes. The onset of regional drought since the late 1990s has resulted in extensive die-off episodes of multiple tree species across millions of acres in the Southwest, fostering substantial collaborative tree mortality research in this region. Ongoing tree mortality research in northern New Mexico includes: reconstruction of historic forest dieback patterns; monitoring of forest and woodland demographies (tree mortality and regeneration); experimental determination of physiological thresholds of drought- and heat-induced tree mortality; relationships between tree growth, drought stress, insects/diseases, and mortality; remote-sensing of landscape-scale patterns of forest stress and die-off; documentation of regional, national, and global patterns of forest die-off; and efforts to improve models of tree mortality processe
Forest responses to increasing aridity and warmth in the southwestern United States
Climate-induced forest dieback: An escalating global phenomenon?
Tree die-off in response to global change-type drought: Mortality insights from a decade of plant water potential measurements
Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: Why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?
Bark beetle outbreaks in western North America: Causes and consequences
Nonlinear dynamics in ecosystem response to climatic change: Case studies and policy implications
Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought
Cross scale interactions, nonlinearities, and forecasting catastrophic events
The importance of rapid, disturbance-induced losses in carbon management and sequestration
Drought-induced shift of a forest-woodland ecotone: Rapid landscape response to climate variation
Natural climatic variability, including episodic droughts, has long been known to trigger accelerated tree mortality in forests worldwide, including in the Southwest U.S. Scientific understanding of the process drivers and spatial patterns of tree mortality is surprisingly limited, constraining our ability to model forest responses to projected climate changes. The onset of regional drought since the late 1990s has resulted in extensive die-off episodes of multiple tree species across millions of acres in the Southwest, fostering substantial collaborative tree mortality research in this region. Ongoing tree mortality research in northern New Mexico includes: reconstruction of historic forest dieback patterns; monitoring of forest and woodland demographies (tree mortality and regeneration); experimental determination of physiological thresholds of drought- and heat-induced tree mortality; relationships between tree growth, drought stress, insects/diseases, and mortality; remote-sensing of landscape-scale patterns of forest stress and die-off; documentation of regional, national, and global patterns of forest die-off; and efforts to improve models of tree mortality processe