Land Cover Change

The past decade encompasses some of the most extensive fire activity in recorded history. An area the size of Vermont (~24,000 km2) burned in a single Siberian fire in the summer of 2019 (Kehrwald et al., 2020 and references therein) while Australia, Indonesia and the Amazon have all experienced their most intense fires in recorded history (van Wees et al, 2021 and references therein). As more...

Land cover change is one of the fundamental measures for understanding pressures on ecosystems and is widely used to understand the consequences to biodiversity and ecosystem services. This study utilizes land cover and other associated socioeconomic and environmental data to examine the consequences of land cover change in human-dominated landscapes, and how provisioning of ecosystem services...

Drought and fire are powerful disturbance agents that can trigger rapid and lasting changes in the forests of western North America. Over the last decade, increases in fire size and severity coincided with warming, drought, and earlier snowmelt, factors that projected climatic changes are likely to exacerbate. However, recent observations are brief relative to the lifespans of trees and include...

It has long been recognized that the Nation’s economic accounts do not reflect our true wealth, due to the omission of natural resources from the Federal balance sheet. For example, U.S. economic accounts do not account for the 2.3 billion acres of land on which we grow food, build and maintain infrastructure, produce energy and minerals, and recreate. Also excluded are water resources used for...

Energy is a cornerstone issue for humanity, nations, and individuals. How we create and use energy impacts the consequences it embodies. The critical issue facing humanity involves meeting our massive and growing energy needs, without undermining human and natural capital. Facing the challenge of long-term, sustainable energy for the nation and world requires understanding the consequences of...

This research uses state-of-the-art vegetation models to simulate vegetation changes across paleo (e.g., 127 ka; 127,000 years ago) to modern (e.g., 21st-century) time periods. We investigate the magnitude, rate, and drivers of vegetation change (e.g., wildfire, drought), with a focus on forest-to-grassland or shrubland and boreal forest-to-tundra transitions in North America. Results of this...

Large wildfires have raged across the western Americas in the past decade including the Las Conchas, New Mexico fire that burned 44,000 acres in a single day in 2011 (Orem and Pelletier, 2015, Geomorphology 232: 224-238, and references therein), the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta fire that required evacuating an entire city, and the 2015 Alaskan fire season that burned more than 5 million acres...