Publications

No abstract available.

Until relatively recently the importance of fire and the origin of fire-adaptive traits have received minimal attention from paleoecologists, and appreciation of this importance has varied across the different mediterranean-type climate (MTC) ecosystems. For example, Axelrod (1973) and Raven & Axelrod (1978) wrote extensive treatises on the origins of the California flora, and yet gave...

A global view of potential vs. actual vegetation distributions points to fire as a major driver of biome distribution and determinant of community structure (Bond et al. 2005). In ecological terms, fire acts much like an herbivore, consuming biomass and competing with biotic consumers for resources, and in this sense is an important part of trophic ecology (Bond & Keeley 2005). As in...

South Africa's mediterranean-type climate (MTC) region is the smallest of the five MTC regions, centered in the southwestern corner of the Western Cape Province (Fig. 7.1). This Cape region is dominated by fynbos shrublands (see Fig. 1.6e) but this fynbos biome continues eastward far outside the MTC. The Cape region is unusual in that shrublands dominate under climate regimes that also...

On the west coast of North America lies the state of California, USA (Fig. 5.1), the bulk of which is dominated by a mediterranean-type climate (MTC). Elevations range from sea level to over 4000 m. Mountain ranges are largely oriented north to south with a major valley between the coastal ranges and the interior Sierra Nevada range. In the rain shadow east of the interior mountain...

The mediterranean-type climate (MTC) in Australia spans from the southwestern part of Western Australia to include much of South Australia and western Victoria (Fig. 8.1), which covers a longitudinal distance second only to the Mediterranean Basin MTC region. As in other MTC regions, the highly fire-prone evergreen sclerophyllous shrub and tree mediterranean-type vegetation (MTV) extends...

The Mediterranean Basin is a meeting point of three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, and this is responsible for the great diversity of plants, animals and cultures that formed the cradle of Western civilization. It is considered one of the biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al. 2000) because of its high species richness and high proportion of endemisms (Thompson 2005). The total area...

Comparative phylogeographic studies have had mixed success in identifying common phylogeographic patterns among co-distributed organisms. Whereas some have found broadly similar patterns across a diverse array of taxa, others have found that the histories of different species are more idiosyncratic than congruent. The variation in the results of comparative phylogeographic studies could...

Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and in so doing can mitigate the effects of climate change. Fire is a natural disturbance process in many forest systems that releases carbon back to the atmosphere. In dry temperate forests, fires historically burned with greater frequency and lower severity than they do today. Frequent fires consumed fuels on the forest floor and maintained...

Sea otters Enhydra lutris can be bycaught and drowned in fishing pots and traps, which may pose a threat to the welfare of otter populations. We explored this potential problem and its solutions using a wide variety of analyses. We exposed live California (USA) sea otters to finfish traps, lobster traps, and mock Dungeness crab traps in captive trials and found that the animals attempted...

Fire frequency, area burned, and fire severity are important attributes of a fire regime, but few studies have quantified the interrelationships among them in evaluating a fire year. Although area burned is often used to summarize a fire season, burned area may not be well correlated with either the number or ecological effect of fires. Using the Landsat data archive, we examined all 148...

Birds that fly over mountain barriers must be capable of meeting the increased energetic cost of climbing in low-density air, even though less oxygen may be available to support their metabolism. This challenge is magnified by the reduction in maximum sustained climbing rates in large birds. Bar-headed geese (Anser indicus) make one of the highest and most iconic transmountain migrations...