Publications

Wildfires destabilize biocrust, requiring decades for most biological constituents to regenerate, but bacteria may recover quickly and mitigate the detrimental consequences of burnt soils. To evaluate the short-term recovery of biocrust bacteria, we tracked shifts in bacterial community form and function in Cyanobacteria/lichen-dominated (shrub interspaces) and Cyanobacteria/moss...

Drylands cover 41% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, play a critical role in global ecosystem function, and are home to over two billion people. Like other biomes, drylands face increasing pressure from global change, but many of these ecosystems are close to tipping points, which, if crossed, can lead to abrupt transitions and persistent degraded states. Their limited but variable...

Aims: Desertification around oasis areas is a serious problem in semi-arid and arid regions, which is expected to continue into the future due to a rapidly increasing human population. Oasis protection systems are created to reverse desertification by recovering degraded soil and vegetation properties and improving ecosystem services. Most research has focused on the short-term effects...

Restoring forest ecosystems has become an increasingly high priority for land managers across the American West. Millions of hectares of forest are in need of drastic yet strategic reductions in density (e.g., basal area). Meeting the restoration and management goals requires quantifying metrics of vertical and horizontal forest structure, which has relied upon field‐based measurements...

Disturbance is a central driver of forest development and ecosystem processes with variable effects within and across ecosystems. Despite the high levels of variation in disturbance severity often observed in forests following natural and anthropogenic disturbance, studies quantifying disturbance impacts often rely on categorical classifications, thus limiting opportunities to examine...

As dryland degradation continues, it is increasingly important to understand how to effectively restore biocrust communities. Potential techniques include the addition of biocrust inoculum to accelerate biocrust recovery. Enhanced erosion typical of degraded environments creates a challenge for these approaches, due to loss by wind or water and burial by saltating particles. To retain...

Pinyon-juniper (PJ) plant communities cover a large area across North America and provide critical habitat for wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and rich cultural resources. These communities occur across a variety of environmental gradients, disturbance regimes, structural conditions and species compositions, including three species of juniper and two species of pinyon. PJ

Defaunation in the Anthropocene has created a need to focus limited conservation resources on geographically-explicit areas with high conservation significance. Priority conservation areas are often defined as those with high biodiversity – hotspots. While these conservation areas are critical to securing global biodiversity, prevailing approaches for their delineation are often...

Dryland ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to erosion generated by livestock grazing. Quantifying this risk across a variety of landscape settings is essential for successful adaptive management, particularly in light of a changing climate. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, there are nearly 25 000 km2 of rangelands with underlying soils derived from Mancos Shale, an erodible and...

No abstract available.

In dryland ecosystems, natural recovery of biological soil crusts (biocrusts) following disturbance may be slow or inhibited, necessitating active restoration practices. While biocrusts can be readily propagated under environmentally controlled conditions, rehabilitation in the field is complicated by environmental stresses which may be particularly acute in degraded, destabilized soils...

(Munson) Climate variability and change acting at broad scales can lead to divergent changes in plant production at local scales. Quantifying how production responds to variation in climate at local scales is essential to understand underlying ecological processes and inform land management decision-making, but has historically been limited in spatiotemporal scale based on the use of...