Publications
Publications, scientific literature, and information products from the Land Change Science Program.
Filter Total Items: 562
Upper Colorado River Basin 20th century droughts under 21st century warming: Plausible scenarios for the future
This study builds on a collaboration with a water resource management community of practice in the Upper Colorado River Basin to develop scenarios of future drought and assess impacts on water supply reliability. Water managers are concerned with the impacts of warming on water year streamflow, but uncertainties in projections of climate make the application of these projections to planning a chal
Authors
Connie A. Woodhouse, Rebecca M. Smith, Stephanie A. McAfee, Gregory T. Pederson, Gregory J. McCabe, W. Paul Miller, Adam Csank
Effects of postfire climate and seed availability on postfire conifer regeneration
Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform p
Authors
Joseph A E Stewart, Phillip J. van Mantgem, Derek J N Young, Kristen L. Shive, Haiganoush K. Preisler, Adrian Das, Nathan L. Stephenson, Jon Keeley, Hugh D. Safford, Micah C. Wright, Kevin R Welch, James H. Thorne
Tidal wetland resilience to increased rates of sea level rise in the Chesapeake Bay: Introduction to the special feature
The papers in this Special Feature are the result of the first Marsh Resilience Summit in the Chesapeake Bay region, which occurred in February 2019. The Chesapeake Bay region has one of the highest rates of relative sea level rise in the U.S., jeopardizing over 1000 km2 of tidal wetlands along with other coastal lands. The goal of the Summit and this collection of articles is to analyze tidal wet
Authors
Taryn A Sudol, Gregory B. Noe, Denise J Reed
Expert assessment of future vulnerability of the global peatland carbon sink
The carbon balance of peatlands is predicted to shift from a sink to a source this century. However, peatland ecosystems are still omitted from the main Earth system models that are used for future climate change projections, and they are not considered in integrated assessment models that are used in impact and mitigation studies. By using evidence synthesized from the literature and an expert el
Authors
Julie Loisel, A.V. Gallego-Sala, M.J. Amesbury, G. Magnan, G. Anshari, D. W. Beilman, J. Blewett, J. C. Benevides, P. Camill, D. J. Charman, S. Chawchai, A. Hedgpeth, T. Kleinen, A. Korhola, D. Large, J. Müller, C. A. Mansilla, S. van Bellen, J. B. West, Z. Yu, J. L. Bubier, M. Garneau, T. Moore, A. B. K. Sannel, M. Väliranta, S. Page, M. Bechtold, V. Brovkin, L. E. S. Cole, J. P. Chanton, T. R. Christensen, M. A. Davies, F. De Vleeschouwer, S.A. Finkelstein, S. Frolking, M. Galka, L. Gandois, N. Girkin, .L.I. Harris, A. Heinemeyer, A.M. Hoyt, Miriam C. Jones, F. Joos, S. Juutinen, K. Kaiser, M. Lamentowicz, T. Larmola, M. Leifeld, A. Lohila, A.M. Milner, Kari Minkkinen, P. Moss, B.D.A. Naafs, J. Nichols, J. O'Donnell, R. Payne, M. Philben, S. Pilo, A. Quillet, A.S. Ratnayake, T.P. Roland, S. Sjogersten, O. Sonnentag, G.T. Swindles, W. Swinnen, J. Talbott, C. C. Treat, A.C. Valach, J. Wu
Forest restoration and fuels reduction: Convergent or divergent?
For over 20 years, forest fuel reduction has been the dominant management action in western US forests. These same actions have also been associated with the restoration of highly altered frequent-fire forests. Perhaps the vital element in the compatibility of these treatments is that both need to incorporate the salient characteristics that frequent fire produced—variability in vegetation structu
Authors
Scott L. Stephens, Mike A. Battaglia, Derek J. Churchill, Brandon M. Collins, Michelle Coppoletta, Chad M. Hoffman, Jamie M. Lydersen, Malcolm P. North, Russell A. Parsons, Scott M. Ritter, Jens Stevens
The geography of islands
Islands come in all shapes, sizes and types, from tiny rocky outcrops, to enormous continental landmasses. The true number of islands distributed in the planet’s seas and oceans is still elusive. Recent efforts bolstered by an abundance of detailed satellite imagery and the sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS) are bringing real answers to those questions closer than ever.
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline Thomas Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Nick Holmes, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, Dena Spatz, Keith VanGraafeiland, David Will
A comparison of plant communities in restored, old field, and remnant coastal prairies
Temperate grasslands are experiencing worldwide declines due to habitat conversion. Grassland restoration efforts are employed to compensate for these losses. However, there is a need to better understand the ecological effects of grassland restoration and management practices. We investigated the effects of three different grassland management regimes on plant communities of coastal prairie ecosy
Authors
Laura Feher, Larry Allain, Michael Osland, Elisabeth Pigott, Christopher Reid, Nicholas Latiolais
Evaluating natural experiments in ecology: Using synthetic controls in assessments of remotely sensed land treatments
Many important ecological phenomena occur on large spatial scales and/or are unplanned and thus do not easily fit within analytical frameworks that rely on randomization, replication, and interspersed a priori controls for statistical comparison. Analyses of such large‐scale, natural experiments are common in the health and econometrics literature, where techniques have been developed to derive in
Authors
Stephen E. Fick, Travis W. Nauman, Colby C. Brungard, Michael C. Duniway
Increased burning in a warming climate reduces carbon uptake in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem despite productivity gains
1. The effects of changing climate and disturbance on mountain forest carbon stocks vary with tree species distributions and over elevational gradients. Warming can increase carbon uptake by stimulating productivity at high elevations but also enhance carbon release by increasing respiration and the frequency, intensity, and size of wildfires.2. To understand the consequences of climate change for
Authors
Paul D. Henne, Todd Hawbaker, Robert M. Scheller, Feng S Zhao, Hong S He, Wenru Xu, Zhiliang Zhu
Spatial variability in seasonal snowpack trends across the Rio Grande headwaters (1984 - 2017)
This study evaluated the spatial variability of trends in simulated snowpack properties across the Rio Grande headwaters of Colorado using the SnowModel snow evolution modeling system. SnowModel simulations were performed using a grid resolution of 100 m and 3-hourly time step over a 34-yr period (1984–2017). Atmospheric forcing was provided by phase 2 of the North American Land Data Assimilation
Authors
Graham A. Sexstone, Colin A. Penn, Glen Liston, Kelly Gleason, C. David Moeser, David W. Clow
Summer runoff generation in foothill catchments of the Colorado Front Range
Climatic shifts, disturbances, and land-use change can alter hydrologic flowpaths, water quality, and water supply to downstream communities. Prior research investigating streamflow generation processes in mountainous areas has largely focused on high-elevation alpine and subalpine catchments; less is known about these processes in lower-elevation foothills and montane catchments. In these lower-e
Authors
Isaac S. Bukoski, Sheila F. Murphy, Andrew L. Birch, Holly R. Barnard
Signatures of hydrologic function across the critical zone observatory network
Despite a multitude of small catchment studies, we lack a deep understanding of how variations in critical zone architecture lead to variations in hydrologic states and fluxes. This study characterizes hydrologic dynamics of 15 catchments of the U.S. Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) network where we hypothesized that our understanding of subsurface structure would illuminate patterns of hydrologic
Authors
Adam N. Wlostowski, Noah P. Molotch, Suzanne P. Anderson, Susan L. Brantley, Jon Chorover, David Dralle, Praveen Kumar, Li Li, Kathleen A. Lohse, John Mallard, Jennifer C. McIntosh, Sheila F. Murphy, Eric Parrish, Mohammad Safeeq, Mark Seyfried, Yuning Shi, Ciaran Harman