Publications

Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) can have profound effects on terrestrial carbon dynamics, yet their effects on the global carbon budget remain uncertain. While land change impacts on ecosystem carbon dynamics have been the focus of numerous studies, few efforts have been based on observational data incorporating multiple ecosystem types spanning large geographic areas over long...

The practice of fire suppression across the western United States over the past century has led to dense forests, and when coupled with drought has contributed to an increase in large and destructive wildfires. Forest management efforts aimed at reducing flammable fuels through various fuel treatments can help to restore frequent fire regimes and increase forest resilience. Our research...

Water-limited ecosystems often recover slowly following anthropogenic or natural disturbance. Multitemporal remote sensing can be used to monitor ecosystem recovery after disturbance; however, dryland vegetation cover can be challenging to accurately measure due to sparse cover and spectral confusion between soils and non-photosynthetic vegetation. With the goal of optimizing a...

Watershed restoration efforts seek to rejuvenate vegetation, biological diversity, and land productivity at Cienega San Bernardino, an important wetland in southeastern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. Rock detention and earthen berm structures were built on the Cienega San Bernardino over the course of four decades, beginning in 1984 and continuing to the present. Previous research...

Quantifying change in urban land provides important information to create empirical models examining the effects of human land use. Maps of developed land from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of the conterminous United States include rural roads in the developed land class and therefore overestimate the amount of urban land. To better map the urban class and understand how urban...

Key findings:Total grassland carbon stocks in the conterminous United States, estimated to be about 7.4 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) in 2005, are projected to increase to about 8.2 Pg C by 2050. Although U.S. grasslands are expected to remain carbon sinks over this period, the uptake rate is projected to decline by about half. In the U.S. Great Plains, land-use and land-cover changes are...

State-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) provide a general framework for forecasting landscape dynamics, including projections of both vegetation and land-use/land-cover (LULC) change. The STSM method divides a landscape into spatially-referenced cells and then simulates the state of each cell forward in time, as a discrete-time stochastic process using a Monte Carlo approach, in...

To explore fog water harvesting potential in California, we conducted long-term measurements involving three types of mesh using standard fog collectors (SFC). Volumetric fog water measurements from SFCs and wind data were collected and recorded in 15-minute intervals over three summertime fog seasons (2014–2016) at four California sites. SFCs were deployed with: standard 1.00 m2 double...

Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) have important and fundamental interactions with the global climate system. Top-down global scale projections of land use change have been an important component of climate change research; however, their utility at local to regional scales is often limited. The goal of this study was to develop an approach for projecting changes in LULC based on...

With growing demand and highly variable inter-annual water supplies, California’s water use future is fraught with uncertainty. Climate change projections, anticipated population growth, and continued agricultural intensification, will likely stress existing water supplies in coming decades. Using a state-and-transition simulation modeling approach, we examine a broad suite of spatially...

Coastal wetlands are important ecosystems for carbon storage and coastal resilience to climate change and sea-level rise. As such, changes in wetland habitat types can also impact ecosystem functions. Our goal was to quantify historical vegetation change within the Nisqually River watershed relevant to carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and wetland sustainability, and identify watershed...

The Hazard Exposure Reporting and Analytics (HERA) dynamic web application was created to provide a platform that makes research on community exposure to coastal-flooding hazards influenced by sea level rise accessible to planners, decision makers, and the public in a manner that is both easy to use and easily accessible. HERA allows users to (a) choose flood-hazard scenarios based on...