Articles

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...

Alpine plants are likely to be particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their restricted distributions and sensitivity to rapid environmental shifts occurring in high-elevation ecosystems. The well-studied Haleakalā silversword (‘āhinahina, Argyroxiphium sandwicense subsp. macrocephalum) already exhibits substantial climate-associated population decline, and offers the...

Fishes exhibit an astounding diversity of locomotor behaviors from classic swimming with their body and fins to jumping, flying, walking, and burrowing. Fishes that use their body and caudal fin (BCF) during undulatory swimming have been traditionally divided into modes based on the length of the propulsive body wave and the ratio of head:tail oscillation amplitude: anguilliform...

Variation in temperature is known to influence mortality patterns in ectotherms. Even though a few experimental studies on model organisms have reported a positive relationship between temperature and actuarial senescence (i.e., the increase in mortality risk with age), how variation in climate influences the senescence rate across the range of a species is still poorly understood in...

Historically, anadromous steelhead Oncorhynchus mykiss and spring-run Chinook Salmon O. tshawytscha used high-elevation rivers in the Sierra Nevada of California but were extirpated in the 20th century by construction of impassable dams. Plans to reintroduce the fish by opening migratory passage across the dams and reservoirs can only succeed if upstream habitats have the capacity to...

Accounting for the variation of visitor conflicts and ecological disturbance of outdoor recreation activities across space and time can cause difficulty for managers seeking to make decisions in social-ecological systems (SESs). We develop a method to quantify and visualize social and ecological intensities resulting from outdoor recreation. We demonstrate the utility of our method at...

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...

Relatively little research has been conducted to systematically quantify the nationwide earthquake risk of gas pipelines in the US; simultaneously, national guidance is limited for operators across the country to consistently evaluate the earthquake risk of their assets. Furthermore, many challenges and uncertainties exist in a comprehensive seismic risk assessment of gas pipelines. As a...

Highly mobile species, such as migratory birds, respond to seasonal and inter-annual variability in resource availability by moving to better habitats. Despite the recognized importance of resource thresholds, species distribution models typically rely on long-term average habitat conditions, mostly because large-extent, temporally-resolved, environmental data are difficult to obtain...

Hurricanes are the major flood generating mechanism dominating the upper tail of the peak discharge distribution over the Cape Fear River Basin (CFRB). In 2018, Hurricane Florence swamped CFRB as the ninth-most-destructive hurricane ever hit the United States and set new records of peak discharges over the main river channel and three out of five of its major tributaries. In this study...

In a recent study, Hough and Martin (2021) considered the extent to which socioeconomic factors influence the numbers and distribution of contributed reports available to characterize the effects of both historical and recent large earthquakes. In this study I explore the question further, focusing on analysis of widely felt earthquakes near major population centers in northern and...

A reliable chlorophyll–nutrient relationship (CNR) is essential for lake eutrophication management. Although the spatial variability of CNRs has been extensively explored, temporal variations of CNRs at the individual lake scale has rarely been discussed. The paucity of information about temporal dependence in CNRs may in part be due to the lack of a suitable statistical framework that...