Publications

Despite the importance of hydrologic regimes to the phenology, demography, and abundance of fishes such as salmonids, there have been surprisingly few syntheses that holistically assess regional, species-specific trends in hydrologic regimes within a framework of climate change. Here, we consider hydrologic regimes within the Greater Yellowstone Area in the Rocky Mountains of western...

No abstract available.

Differences in plant communities are a response to the abiotic environment, species interactions, and dispersal. The role of geographic distance relative to the abiotic environment is explored for alpine tundra vegetation from 319 plots of four regions along the Rocky Mountain cordillera in the USA. The site by species data were ordinated using nonmetric multidimensional scaling to...

Wildfire is increasingly a concern in the USA, where 10 million acres burned in 2015. Climate is a primary driver of wildfire, and understanding fire-climate relationships is crucial for informing fire management and modeling the effects of climate change on fire. In the southwestern USA, fire-climate relationships have been informed by tree-ring data that extend centuries prior to the...

We assessed > 100 years of mercury (Hg) pollution recorded in the tree rings of Scots Pine near a Czech chlor-alkali plant operating since 1941. Hg concentrations in tree rings increased with the launching of plant operations and decreased when Hg emissions decreased in 1975 due to an upgrade in production technology. Similar to traditional bioindicators of pollution such as pine needles...

Droughts, which can strongly affect both hydrologic and biogeochemical systems, are projected to become more prevalent in the tropics in the future. We assessed the effects of an extreme drought during 2015 on stream water composition in the Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico. We demonstrated that drought base flow in the months leading up to the study was sourced from trade-wind...

Plant nutrient concentrations and stoichiometry drive fundamental ecosystem processes, with important implications for primary production, diversity, and ecosystem sustainability. While a range of evidence exists regarding how plant nutrients vary across spatial scales, our understanding of their temporal variation remains less well understood. Nevertheless, we know nutrients regulate...

Climate change effects on vegetation will likely be strong in the southwestern U.S., which is projected to experience large increases in temperature and changes in precipitation. Plant communities in the southwestern U.S. may be particularly vulnerable to climate change as the productivity of many plant species is strongly water-limited. This study examines the relationship between...

In the catchments of the Rocky Mountains, peak snowpack is declining in response to warmer spring temperatures. To understand how this will influence terrestrial gross primary production (GPP), we compared precipitation data across the intermountain west with satellite retrievals of solar-induced fluorescence (SIF), a proxy for GPP. Annual precipitation patterns explained most of the...

Mangrove wetlands provide ecosystem services for millions of people, most prominently by providing storm protection, food and fodder. Mangrove wetlands are also valuable ecosystems for promoting carbon (C) sequestration and storage. However, loss of mangrove wetlands and these ecosystem services are a global concern, prompting the restoration and creation of mangrove wetlands as a...

The Upper Fremont Glacier (UFG), Wyoming, is one of the few continental glaciers in the contiguous United States known to preserve environmental and climate records spanning recent centuries. A pair of ice cores taken from UFG have been studied extensively to document changes in climate and industrial pollution (most notably, mid-19th century increases in mercury pollution). Fundamental...

Earth’s biodiversity and carbon uptake by plants, or primary productivity, are intricately interlinked, underlie many essential ecosystem processes, and depend on the interplay among environmental factors, many of which are being changed by human activities. While ecological theory generalizes across taxa and environments, most empirical tests of factors controlling diversity and...