Climate-related forest disturbances, particularly drought-induced tree mortality and large, high-severity fires from increasingly warm and dry conditions, are altering forest ecosystems and the ecosystem services society depends on (e.g., water supplies). Our research combines long-term place-based ecological data, diverse methods (e.g., paleo, remote-sensing), and networking approaches to understand current and future drivers of drought- and fire-related forest disturbances, and how these disturbances are likely to impact Southern Rocky Mountain ecosystems and hydrology. Better understanding of the short- and long-term interactions between ecosystem and hydrologic processes, climate variability, and disturbance will support local and regional efforts to anticipate and adapt to future drought-related forest mortality and wildfires.
Statement of Problem:
Western mountains, including the Southern Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico, are increasingly subject to accelerating and transformative changes in forest landscape processes driven by climate-forced alterations in water and ecosystem dynamics. Warming temperatures across western North America are driving earlier snowmelt and increasing proportions of rain versus snow, along with increases in atmospheric vapor pressure deficit, resulting in: a) altered and diminished water resources, ranging from snowpacks and stream flows to glaciers and lakes; b) decreasing plant-available-water, increasing forest drought-stress, tree growth declines, extensive insect outbreaks, and forest die-offs; and c) larger and more severe fires that affect vegetation, watersheds, and society (Stevens et al., 2017). This project addresses these emergent changes in forest and hydrological patterns and processes in response to climate variability in Southern Rocky Mountain landscapes.
Why this Research is Important:
Forests sequester the majority of the terrestrial biosphere’s carbon, making them key components of the global carbon cycle and potentially strong contributors of biogenic feedbacks to climatic change. Additionally, forests provide humans with economically important and often irreplaceable ecosystem goods and services, such as carbon sequestration, clean water, wood products, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities. Yet society’s ability to understand, predict, and respond to the effects of climatic changes on forests are limited by (1) lack of information on ongoing forest changes and their diverse causes, (2) our surprisingly poor understanding of many of the basic processes (particularly disturbances like drought-kill, insect outbreaks, fire) that drive forest dynamics, hampering our ability to forecast future changes, and (3) lack of science-based adaptation options. Our work helps fill these gaps.
Objective(s):
The overall objective of this project is to investigate effects of climate variability and changing land use on long-term ecosystem dynamics, changing disturbance regimes, and related ecohydrology issues in forests of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Our collective research will improve the understanding of the interactions between climate variability, disturbance, and forest ecosystems. This enhanced understanding will inform effective management of these landscapes for long-term resilience and ecosystem services.
Methods:
To accomplish our objective, we will build upon our unique, long-term, place-based data sets from forested landscapes of northern New Mexico that are part of larger networks of similar data. Specifically, we will:
- Develop multi-century to millennial-length tree-ring chronologies for reconstruction of climate variability, including the North American Monsoon. Tree rings provide multi-century to millennial-scale records of climate at annual to sub-annual resolution that are vital to understanding long-term patterns and drivers of climate variability.
- Investigate drivers and patterns of long-term changes in forest structure, composition, and fire regimes. Changing land use has altered fire regimes and forest structure and composition in many dry conifer forests across western North America.
- Continue and expand long-term measurements of forest plots across environmental gradients to monitor for changing ecosystem processes in response to climate variability and disturbance. Long-term monitoring of forest plots provides critical data for assessing patterns and processes of ecosystem change.
- Continue long-term monitoring in Bandelier National Monument of tree growth and cellular-level xylogenesis analyses to investigate environmental drivers of tree physiological processes and monitor for emerging trends.
- Continue multi-disciplinary research on changing tree mortality patterns, trends, and drivers at local, regional, and global scales.
- Analyze drivers, patterns, and trends of contemporary fire in the Southwest. We will use remotely-sensed burn severity products and new algorithms for analyzing patch characteristics to assess trends in forest fire severity characteristics in Arizona and New Mexico over the past 38 years, identifying key climatic, weather, and land management drivers of variation in fire severity.
- Investigate how recent wildfires are impacting winter snowpack in montane forests. We will build on existing research using remotely-sensed and field-based measurements to document snowpack depth across a gradient of fire severity in the Jemez Mountains, and assess whether there is an optimal gap size in post-fire landscapes that can maximize snowpack retention.
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
The Western Mountain Initiative (WMI)
USGS Snow and Avalanche Project
Accelerating changes and transformations in western mountain lakes
Forest health and drought response
The New Mexico Landscapes Field Station
New Mexico Dendroecology Lab
Below are multimedia items associated with this project.
Below are publications associated with this project.
Dendrochronology of a rare long-lived mediterranean shrub
Wildfire-driven forest conversion in western North American landscapes
The Fire and Tree Mortality Database, for empirical modeling of individual tree mortality after fire
Biogeography of fire regimes in western US conifer forests: A trait-based approach
Forest vegetation change and its impacts on soil water following 47 years of managed wildfire
Climate relationships with increasing wildfire in the southwestern US from 1984 to 2015
Fire history across forest types in the southern Beartooth Mountains, Wyoming
Spatio-temporal variability of human-fire interactions on the Navajo Nation
Rapid broad-scale ecosystem changes and their consequences for biodiversity
Surface fire to Crown Fire: Fire history in the Taos Valley watersheds, New Mexico, USA
- Overview
Climate-related forest disturbances, particularly drought-induced tree mortality and large, high-severity fires from increasingly warm and dry conditions, are altering forest ecosystems and the ecosystem services society depends on (e.g., water supplies). Our research combines long-term place-based ecological data, diverse methods (e.g., paleo, remote-sensing), and networking approaches to understand current and future drivers of drought- and fire-related forest disturbances, and how these disturbances are likely to impact Southern Rocky Mountain ecosystems and hydrology. Better understanding of the short- and long-term interactions between ecosystem and hydrologic processes, climate variability, and disturbance will support local and regional efforts to anticipate and adapt to future drought-related forest mortality and wildfires.
Statement of Problem:
Western mountains, including the Southern Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico, are increasingly subject to accelerating and transformative changes in forest landscape processes driven by climate-forced alterations in water and ecosystem dynamics. Warming temperatures across western North America are driving earlier snowmelt and increasing proportions of rain versus snow, along with increases in atmospheric vapor pressure deficit, resulting in: a) altered and diminished water resources, ranging from snowpacks and stream flows to glaciers and lakes; b) decreasing plant-available-water, increasing forest drought-stress, tree growth declines, extensive insect outbreaks, and forest die-offs; and c) larger and more severe fires that affect vegetation, watersheds, and society (Stevens et al., 2017). This project addresses these emergent changes in forest and hydrological patterns and processes in response to climate variability in Southern Rocky Mountain landscapes.
Why this Research is Important:
Forests sequester the majority of the terrestrial biosphere’s carbon, making them key components of the global carbon cycle and potentially strong contributors of biogenic feedbacks to climatic change. Additionally, forests provide humans with economically important and often irreplaceable ecosystem goods and services, such as carbon sequestration, clean water, wood products, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities. Yet society’s ability to understand, predict, and respond to the effects of climatic changes on forests are limited by (1) lack of information on ongoing forest changes and their diverse causes, (2) our surprisingly poor understanding of many of the basic processes (particularly disturbances like drought-kill, insect outbreaks, fire) that drive forest dynamics, hampering our ability to forecast future changes, and (3) lack of science-based adaptation options. Our work helps fill these gaps.
Objective(s):
The overall objective of this project is to investigate effects of climate variability and changing land use on long-term ecosystem dynamics, changing disturbance regimes, and related ecohydrology issues in forests of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Our collective research will improve the understanding of the interactions between climate variability, disturbance, and forest ecosystems. This enhanced understanding will inform effective management of these landscapes for long-term resilience and ecosystem services.
Methods:
To accomplish our objective, we will build upon our unique, long-term, place-based data sets from forested landscapes of northern New Mexico that are part of larger networks of similar data. Specifically, we will:
- Develop multi-century to millennial-length tree-ring chronologies for reconstruction of climate variability, including the North American Monsoon. Tree rings provide multi-century to millennial-scale records of climate at annual to sub-annual resolution that are vital to understanding long-term patterns and drivers of climate variability.
- Investigate drivers and patterns of long-term changes in forest structure, composition, and fire regimes. Changing land use has altered fire regimes and forest structure and composition in many dry conifer forests across western North America.
- Continue and expand long-term measurements of forest plots across environmental gradients to monitor for changing ecosystem processes in response to climate variability and disturbance. Long-term monitoring of forest plots provides critical data for assessing patterns and processes of ecosystem change.
- Continue long-term monitoring in Bandelier National Monument of tree growth and cellular-level xylogenesis analyses to investigate environmental drivers of tree physiological processes and monitor for emerging trends.
- Continue multi-disciplinary research on changing tree mortality patterns, trends, and drivers at local, regional, and global scales.
- Analyze drivers, patterns, and trends of contemporary fire in the Southwest. We will use remotely-sensed burn severity products and new algorithms for analyzing patch characteristics to assess trends in forest fire severity characteristics in Arizona and New Mexico over the past 38 years, identifying key climatic, weather, and land management drivers of variation in fire severity.
- Investigate how recent wildfires are impacting winter snowpack in montane forests. We will build on existing research using remotely-sensed and field-based measurements to document snowpack depth across a gradient of fire severity in the Jemez Mountains, and assess whether there is an optimal gap size in post-fire landscapes that can maximize snowpack retention.
- Science
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
The Western Mountain Initiative (WMI)
Western Mountain Initiative (WMI) is a long-term collaboration between FORT, WERC, NOROCK, USFS, NPS, LANL, and universities worldwide to address changes in montane forests and watersheds due to climate change. Current emphases include altered forest disturbance regimes (fire, die-off, insect outbreaks) and hydrology; interactions between plants, water, snow, nutrient cycles, and climate; and...USGS Snow and Avalanche Project
Snow avalanches are a widespread natural hazard to humans and infrastructure as well as an important landscape disturbance affecting mountain ecosystems. Forecasting avalanche frequency is challenging on various spatial and temporal scales, and this project aims to fill a gap in snow science by focusing on reconstructing avalanche history on the continental mountain range scale - throughout the...Accelerating changes and transformations in western mountain lakes
While research into eutrophication has been a cornerstone of limnology for more than 100 years, only recently has it become a topic for the remote alpine lakes that are icons of protected national parks and wilderness areas. National park lakes in the western U.S. are threatened by global change, specifically air pollution, warming, and their interactions, and the problem is quickly worsening...Forest health and drought response
Forests provide society with economically important and often irreplaceable goods and services, such as wood products, carbon sequestration, clean water, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities. Yet hotter droughts (droughts in which unusually high temperatures exacerbate the effects of low precipitation) are projected to increase in frequency and intensity in coming decades, potentially...The New Mexico Landscapes Field Station
The New Mexico Landscapes Field Station is a place-based, globally-connected, ecological research group that studies and interprets ecosystem and wildlife dynamics, working with land managers and community leaders to deliver solutions that foster the linked health of human and natural systems. Our partnerships, and co-location, with land management agencies provide us with opportunities to deliver...New Mexico Dendroecology Lab
Using tree ring analysis as a primary research tool, we conduct landscape-scale ecological research that focuses on the effects of climate variability on forest ecology, fire ecology, and ecohydrology. We are the only tree-ring lab in New Mexico, working in close collaboration with Bandelier National Monument and Emeritus Regents’ Professor Dr. Thomas Swetnam. However, we were not the first... - Multimedia
Below are multimedia items associated with this project.
- Publications
Below are publications associated with this project.
Dendrochronology of a rare long-lived mediterranean shrub
Ceanothus verrucosus (CEVE) is a globally rare, long-lived, chaparral shrub endemic to coastal southern California (CA) and northern Mexico. There is concern for CEVE persistence because of habitat loss, fire, and climate change, yet little is known about basic features of the plant, including whether it contains annual rings, plant age, and climate–growth response. Growth-ring analysis was challeAuthorsEllis Margolis, Keith Lombardo, Andrew E. SmithWildfire-driven forest conversion in western North American landscapes
Changing disturbance regimes and climate can overcome forest ecosystem resilience. Following high-severity fire, forest recovery may be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier postfire climate, or short-interval reburning. A potential outcome of the loss of resilience is the conversion of the prefire forest to a different forest type or nonforest vegetation. Conversion implies mAuthorsJonathan D. Coop, Sean A. Parks, Camile S Stevens-Rumann, Shelley D. Crausbay, Philip E. Higuera, Matthew D. Hurteau, Alan J. Tepley, Ellen Whitman, Timothy J Assal, Brandon M. Collins, Kimberley T Davis, Solomon Dobrowski, Donald A. Falk, Paula J. Fornwalt, Peter Z Fulé, Brian J. Harvey, Van R. Kane, Caitlin E. Littlefield, Ellis Margolis, Malcolm North, Marc-André Parisien, Susan Prichard, Kyle C. RodmanThe Fire and Tree Mortality Database, for empirical modeling of individual tree mortality after fire
Wildland fires have a multitude of ecological effects in forests, woodlands, and savannas across the globe. A major focus of past research has been on tree mortality from fire, as trees provide a vast range of biological services. We assembled a database of individual-tree records from prescribed fires and wildfires in the United States. The Fire and Tree Mortality (FTM) database includes recordsAuthorsC. Alina Cansler, Sharon M. Hood, J. Morgan Varner, Phillip J. van Mantgem, Michelle C. Agne, Robert A. Andrus, Matthew P. Ayres, Bruce D. Ayres, Jonathan D. Bakker, Michael A. Battaglia, Barbara J. Bentz, Carolyn R. Breece, James K. Brown, Daniel R. Cluck, Tom W. Coleman, R. Gregory Corace, W. Wallace Covington, Douglas S. Cram, James B. Cronan, Joseph E. Crouse, Adrian Das, Ryan S. Davis, Darci M. Dickinson, Stephen A Fitzgerald, Peter Z. Fule, Lisa M. Ganio, Lindsay M. Grayson, Charles B. Halpern, Jim L. Hanula, Brian J. Harvey, J. Kevin Hiers, David W. Huffman, MaryBeth Keifer, Tara L. Keyser, Leda N. Kobziar, Thomas E. Kolb, Crystal A. Kolden, Karen E. Kopper, Jason R. Kreitler, Jesse K. Kreye, Andrew M. Latimer, Andrew P. Lerch, Maria J. Lombardero, Virginia L. McDaniel, Charles W. McHugh, Joel D. McMillin, Jason J. Moghaddas, Joseph J. O'Brien, Daniel D. B. Perrakis, David W. Peterson, Susan J. Pritchard, Robert A. Progar, Kenneth F. Raffa, Elizabeth D. Reinhardt, Joseph C. Restaino, John P. Roccaforte, Brendan M. Rogers, Kevin C. Ryan, Hugh D. Safford, Alyson E. Santoro, Timothy M. Shearman, Alice M. Shumate, Carolyn H. Sieg, Sheri L. Smith, Rebecca J. Smith, Nathan L. Stephenson, Mary Stuever, Jens Stevens, Michael T. Stoddard, Walter G. Thies, Nicole M. Vaillant, Shelby A. Weiss, Douglas J. Westlind, Travis J. Woolley, Micah C. WrightBiogeography of fire regimes in western US conifer forests: A trait-based approach
Aim Functional traits are a critical link between species distributions and the ecosystem processes that structure those species’ niches. Concurrent increases in the availability of functional trait data and our ability to model species distributions present an opportunity to develop functional trait biogeography, i.e. the mapping of functional traits across space. Functional trait biogeography caAuthorsJens Stevens, Matthew M. Kling, Dylan W. Schwilk, J. Morgan Varner, Jeffrey M. KaneForest vegetation change and its impacts on soil water following 47 years of managed wildfire
Managed wildfire is an increasingly relevant management option to restore variability in vegetation structure within fire-suppressed montane forests in western North America. Managed wildfire often reduces tree cover and density, potentially leading to increases in soil moisture availability, water storage in soils and groundwater, and streamflow. However, the potential hydrologic impacts of managAuthorsJens Stevens, Gabrielle F. S. Boisramé, Ekaterina Rakhmatulina, Sally E. Thompson, Brandon M. Collins, Scott L. StephensClimate relationships with increasing wildfire in the southwestern US from 1984 to 2015
Over the last several decades in forest and woodland ecosystems of the southwestern United States, wildfire size and severity have increased, thereby increasing the vulnerability of these systems to type conversions, invasive species, and other disturbances. A combination of land use history and climate change is widely thought to be contributing to the changing fire regimes. We examined climate-fAuthorsStephanie Mueller, Andrea E. Thode, Ellis Margolis, Larissa Yocom, Jesse M. Young, José M. IniguezFire history across forest types in the southern Beartooth Mountains, Wyoming
Fire is a critical ecosystem process that has played a key role in shaping forests throughout the Beartooth Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. The highly variable topography of the area provides ideal conditions to compare fire regimes across contiguous forest types, yet pyro-dendrochronological research in this area is limited. We reconstructed fire frequency, tree age structure, and post-fire trAuthorsSabrina R. Brown, Ashley Baysinger, Peter M. Brown, Justin L. Cheek, Jeffrey M. Diez, Christopher M. Gentry, Thomas A. Grant III, Jeannine-Marie St-Jacques, David A. Jordan, Morgan L. Leef, Mary K. Rourke, James H. Speer, Carrie E. Spradlin, Jens Stevens, Jeffery R. Stone, Brian Van Winkle, Nickolas E. Zeibig-KichasSpatio-temporal variability of human-fire interactions on the Navajo Nation
Unraveling the effects of climate and land-use on historical fire regimes provides important insights into broader human-fire-climate dynamics, which are necessary for ecologically-based forest management. We developed a spatial human land-use model for Navajo Nation forests across which we sampled a network of tree-ring fire history sites to reflect contrasting historical land-use intensity: highAuthorsChristopher H. Guiterman, Ellis Margolis, Christopher H. Baisan, Donald A. Falk, Craig D. Allen, Thomas W. SwetnamRapid broad-scale ecosystem changes and their consequences for biodiversity
Biodiversity contributes to and depends on ecosystem structure and associated function. Ecosystem structure, such as the amount and type of tree cover, influences fundamental abiotic variables such as near-ground incoming solar radiation (e.g., Royer et al. 2011), which in turn affects species and associated biodiversity (e.g., Trotter et al. 2008). In many systems, foundational, dominant, or keysAuthorsDavid D. Breshears, Jason P. Field, Darin J. Law, Juan C. Villegas, Craig D. Allen, Neil S. Cobb, John B. BradfordSurface fire to Crown Fire: Fire history in the Taos Valley watersheds, New Mexico, USA
Tree-ring fire scars, tree ages, historical photographs, and historical surveys indicate that, for centuries, fire played different ecological roles across gradients of elevation, forest, and fire regimes in the Taos Valley Watersheds. Historical fire regimes collapsed across the three watersheds by 1899, leaving all sites without fire for at least 119 years. Historical photographs and quaking aspAuthorsLane B Johnson, Ellis Margolis