Publications

Ecosystems of Alaska are rain-, snow-, and ice-driven systems. Consequently, the status of water—liquid or solid—strongly in uences resources and the people using ecosystem services. This document examines changes in water dynamics, the resulting consequences for ecosystems and people, and management options for adapting to changing conditions. Changes in snow, ice, and water ripple...

Simulation models can represent complexities of the real world and serve as virtual laboratories for asking “what if…?” questions about how systems might respond to different scenarios. However, simulation models have limited relevance to real-world applications when designed without input from people who could use the simulated scenarios to inform their decisions. Here, we report on a...

Historical and presettlement relationships between drought and wildfire have been well documented in much of North America, with forest fire occurrence and area burned clearly increasing in response to drought. Drought interacts with other controls (forest productivity, topography, and fire weather) to affect fire intensity and severity. Fire regime characteristics (area, frequency...

The relationship between traditional metrics of research impact (e.g., number of citations) and alternative metrics (altmetrics) such as Twitter activity are of great interest, but remain imprecisely quantified. We used generalized linear mixed modeling to estimate the relative effects of Twitter activity, journal impact factor, and time since publication on Web of Science citation rates...

The massive investment of resources devoted to monitoring and assessment of economic and societal indicators in the United States is neither matched by nor linked to efforts to monitor and assess the ecosystem services and biodiversity that support economic and social well-being. Although national-scale assessments of biodiversity (1) and ecosystem indicators (2) have been undertaken...

Wheat stem sawfly (Cephus cinctus Norton, Hymenoptera: Cephidae) has long been a significant insect pest of spring, and more recently, winter wheat in the northern Great Plains. Wheat stem sawfly was first observed infesting winter wheat in Colorado in 2010 and, subsequently, has spread rapidly throughout wheat production regions of the state. Here, we used maximum entropy modeling...

The Yukon River Basin, underlain by discontinuous permafrost, has experienced a warming climate over the last century that has altered air temperature, precipitation, and permafrost. We investigated a water chemistry database from 1982 to 2014 for the Yukon River and its major tributary, the Tanana River. Significant increases of Ca, Mg, and Na annual flux were found in both rivers...

Refugia have long been studied from paleontological and biogeographical perspectives to understand how populations persisted during past periods of unfavorable climate. Recently, researchers have applied the idea to contemporary landscapes to identify climate change refugia, here defined as areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of...

Human‐caused climate change is predicted to affect the frequency of hazard‐linked extremes. Unusually large wildfires are a type of extreme event that is constrained by climate and can be a hazard to society but also an important ecological disturbance. This chapter focuses on changes in the frequency of extreme monthly area burned by wildfires for the end of the 21st century for a...

The third United States National Climate Assessment emphasized an evaluation of not just the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, but also the impacts of climate change on the benefits that people derive from nature, known as ecosystem services. The ecosystems, biodiversity, and ecosystem services component of the assessment largely drew upon the findings of a...

Decision support tools can aid decision making by systematically incorporating information, accounting for uncertainties, and facilitating evaluation between alternatives. Without user buy-in, however, decision support tools can fail to influence decision-making processes. We surveyed fishery researchers, managers, and fishers affiliated with the Lake Whitefish Coregonus clupeaformis...

Within the varied contexts of environmental policy, conservation of imperilled species populations, and restoration of damaged habitats, an emphasis on idealized optimal conditions has led to increasingly specific targets for management. Overly-precise conservation targets can reduce habitat variability at multiple scales, with unintended consequences for future ecological resilience. We...