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Publications

Listed here are publications, reports and articles by the Climate R&D program.

Filter Total Items: 1018

Reconciling models and measurements of marsh vulnerability to sea level rise

Tidal marsh survival in the face of sea level rise (SLR) and declining sediment supply often depends on the ability of marshes to build soil vertically. However, numerical models typically predict survival under rates of SLR that far exceed field-based measurements of vertical accretion. Here, we combine novel measurements from seven U.S. Atlantic Coast marshes and data from 70 additional marshes
Authors
Daniel J. Coleman, Mark Schuerch, Stijn Temmerman, Glenn R. Guntenspergen, Christopher G. Smith, Matthew L. Kirwan

Climate and land change impacts on future managed wetland habitat: A case study from California’s Central Valley

ConceptCalifornia’s Central Valley provides critical habitat for migratory waterbirds, yet only 10% of naturally occurring wetlands remain. Competition for limited water supplies and climate change will impact the long-term viability of these intensively managed habitats.ObjectivesForecast the distribution, abundance, and connectivity of surface water and managed wetland habitats, using 5 spatiall
Authors
Tamara S. Wilson, Elliott Matchett, Kristin B. Byrd, Erin Conlisk, Matthew E. Reiter, Cynthia Wallace, Lorraine E. Flint, Alan L. Flint, Monica Mei Jeen Moritsch

Coastal paleogeography of the Pacific Northwest, USA, for the last 12,000 years accounting for three-dimensional earth structure

Predictive modeling of submerged archaeological sites requires accurate sea-level predictions in order to reconstruct coastal paleogeography and associated geographic features that may have influenced the locations of occupation sites such as rivers and embayments. Earlier reconstructions of the paleogeography of parts of the western U.S. coast used an assumption of eustatic sea level, but this ne
Authors
Jorie Clark, Jay R. Alder, Marisa Borreggine, Jerry X Mitrovica, Konstantin Latychev

Understanding rates of change: A case study using fossil pollen records from California to assess the potential for and challenges to a regional data synthesis

Insights into the rates at which ecosystems and vegetation respond to a changing climate is fundamental to anticipating impacts of projected climate change. Characterization of vegetation change over millennia to centuries has potential to make an important contribution toward this goal, and regional scale syntheses of fossil pollen data can provide the foundation for this understanding. However,
Authors
Lysanna Anderson, David Wahl, T. Bhattacharya

A quantitative soil-geomorphic framework for developing and mapping ecological site groups

Land management decisions need context about how landscapes will respond to different circumstances or actions. As ecologists’ understanding of nonlinear ecological dynamics has evolved into state-and-transition models (STMs), they have put more emphasis on defining and mapping the soil, geomorphological, and climate parameters that mediate these dynamics. The US Department of Agriculture Natural
Authors
Travis W. Nauman, Samuel S Burch, Joel T. Humphries, Anna C Knight, Michael C. Duniway

Exposure of cultural resources to 21st-century climate change: Towards a risk management plan

Anthropogenic climate change during the 21st century presents a significant challenge to the protection of cultural resources (CRs) on federal lands that encompass ∼ 28% of the U.S. In particular, CRs on this land base may be adversely affected by a wide range of climate-change hazards, including damage by sea-level rise, enhanced deterioration by increasing temperature and precipitation, and dest
Authors
Jorie Clark, Jeremy Littell, Jay R. Alder, Nathan Teats

Paleohydrological context for recent floods and droughts in the Fraser River Basin, British Columbia, Canada

The recent intensification of floods and droughts in the Fraser River Basin (FRB) of British Columbia has had profound cultural, ecological, and economic impacts that are expected to be exacerbated further by anthropogenic climate change. In part due to short instrumental runoff records, the long-term stationarity of hydroclimatic extremes in this major North American watershed remains poorly unde
Authors
Rebecca Lynn Brice, Bethany Coulthard, Inga Homfeld, Laura Dye, Kevin Anchukaitis

Experimental tree mortality does not induce marsh transgression in a Chesapeake Bay low-lying coastal forest

Transgression into adjacent uplands is an important global response of coastal wetlands to accelerated rates of sea level rise. “Ghost forests” mark a signature characteristic of marsh transgression on the landscape, as changes in tidal inundation and salinity cause bordering upland tree mortality, increase light availability, and the emergence of tidal marsh species due to reduced competition. To
Authors
David C Walters, Joel A. Carr, Alyssa Hockaday, Joshua A Jones, Eliza McFarland, Katya Kovalenko, Matthew L. Kirwan, Donald Cahoon, Glenn R. Guntenspergen

What determines the effectiveness of Pinyon-Juniper clearing treatments? Evidence from the remote sensing archive and counter-factual scenarios

In the intermountain western US, expansion of Pinyon (Pinus edulis) and Juniper (Juniperus spp.) woodlands (PJ) into grasslands and shrublands is a pervasive phenomenon, and an example of the global trend towards enhanced woody growth in drylands. Due to the perceived impacts of these expansions on ecosystem services related to biodiversity, hydrology, soil stability, fire prevention, and livestoc
Authors
Stephen E. Fick, Travis W. Nauman, Colby C. Brungard, Michael C. Duniway

Empirically validated drought vulnerability mapping in the mixed conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada

Severe droughts are predicted to become more frequent in the future, and the consequences of such droughts on forests can be dramatic, resulting in massive tree mortality, rapid change in forest structure and composition, and substantially increased risk of catastrophic fire. Forest managers have tools at their disposal to try to mitigate these effects but are often faced with limited resources, f
Authors
Adrian Das, Michèle R Slaton, Jeffrey Mallory, Gregory P. Asner, Roberta E. Martin, Paul Hardwick

Crowding, climate, and the case for social distancing among trees

In an emerging era of megadisturbance, bolstering forest resilience to wildfire, insects, and drought has become a central objective in many western forests. Climate has received considerable attention as a driver of these disturbances, but few studies have examined the complexities of climate–vegetation–disturbance interactions. Current strategies for creating resilient forests often rely on retr
Authors
Tucker J. Furniss, Adrian Das, Phillip J. van Mantgem, Nathan L. Stephenson, James A. Lutz

Beyond bulk: Density fractions explain heterogeneity in global soil carbon abundance and persistence

Understanding the controls on the amount and persistence of soil organic carbon (C) is essential for predicting its sensitivity to global change. The response may depend on whether C is unprotected, isolated within aggregates, or protected from decomposition by mineral associations. Here, we present a global synthesis of the relative influence of environmental factors on soil organic C partitionin
Authors
Katherine Heckman, Caitlin E. Hicks Pries, Corey Lawrence, Craig Rasmussen, Susan E. Crow, Alison M. Hoyt, Sophie F. von Fromm, Zheng Shi, Shane Stoner, Casey McGrath, Jeffery Beem-Miller, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Joseph C. Blankinship, Marco Keiluweit, Erika Marín-Spiotta, J. Grey Monroe, Alain F. Plante, Joshua Schimel, Carlos A. Sierra, Aaron Thompson, Rota Wagai