Publications

In low-resource ecosystems, competition among primary producers can be reduced through the partitioning of limiting resources in space or time. Partitioning, coupled with species interactions, can be a source of ecosystem stability by retaining resources within a biotic “loop” and slowing losses due to physical processes, such as erosion, gaseous loss, or leaching. Such coupling occurs...

1. The assessment of terrestrial wetland carbon stocks has improved greatly since the First State of the Carbon Cycle Report (CCSP 2007) because of recent national inventories and the development of a U.S. soils database. Terrestrial wetlands in North America encompass an estimated 2.2 million km2, which constitutes about 37% of the global wetland area, with a soil and vegetation carbon...

The fire history of the Tibetan Plateau over centennial to millennial timescales is not well known. Recent ice core studies reconstruct fire history over the past few decades but do not extend through the Holocene. Lacustrine sedimentary cores, however, can provide continuous records of local environmental change on millennial scales during the Holocene through the accumulation and...

Water availability is a major factor constraining humanity's ability to meet the future food and energy needs of a growing and increasingly affluent human population. Water plays an important role in the production of energy, including renewable energy sources and the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels that are expected to become important players in future energy security. The...

Natural wet slab avalanches release when rain or melt water decreases snowpack strength, and natural dry slab avalanches release when an increased load overcomes snowpack strength. This study investigates avalanche activity resulting from mixed rain and snow falling on a faceted snowpack. This scenario produced an extensive slab avalanche cycle in March 2018 in the mountains near Ketchum...

Understanding snow depth distribution and change is useful for avalanche forecasting and mitigation, runoff forecasting, and infrastructure planning. Advances in remote sensing are improving the ability to collect snow depth measurements. The development of structure from motion (SfM), a photogrammetry technique, combined with the use of uninhabited aerial systems (UASs) allows for high...

Under acidic atmospheric conditions, iron leached from atmospheric mineral dust may influence the distribution of bioavailable iron at a global scale. However, the effects of non-Fe-containing minerals on iron dissolution remain unknown. This work describes metal-metal synergistic and antagonistic effects on iron dissolution that go beyond aggregation and ionic strength effects in...

Over the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), temperatures in widely used gridded data products do not warm as much as mean temperatures from a stable set of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations, located at generally lower elevations, in most months of the year. This is contrary to expectations of elevation-dependent warming, which suggests that warming increases with...

A transect of paleoshelf cores from Maryland and New Jersey contains a ~0.19 m to 1.61 m thick interval with reduced percentages of carbonate during the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Outer paleoshelf cores are barren of nannofossils and correspond to two minor disconformities. Middle paleoshelf cores contain a mixture of samples devoid of nannofossils and those...

Continental paleoclimate proxies with near-global coverage are rare. Land snail δ18O is one of the few proxies abundant in Quaternary sediments ranging from the tropics to the high Arctic tundra. However, its application in paleoclimatology remains difficult, attributable in part to limitations in published calibration studies. Here we present shell δ18O of modern small (

Population vulnerability from tsunamis is a function of the number and location of individuals in hazard zones and their ability to reach safety before wave arrival. Previous tsunami disasters can provide insight on likely evacuation behavior, but post-disaster assessments have not been used extensively in evacuation modeling. We demonstrate the utility of post-disaster assessments in...

Portable luminescence readers are exciting new tools that have the potential to rapidly determine the age structure of late Quaternary stratigraphic columns. This is important because high-resolution age profiling can reveal details about the temporal dynamics of climate cause and ecosystem effect, often while researchers are still in the field. In this paper, we compare new portable...