Publications

Wildfires and climate change are having transformative effects on vegetation composition and structure, and post-fire management may have long-lasting impacts on ecosystem reorganization. Post-fire aerial seeding treatments are commonly used to reduce runoff and soil erosion, but little is known about how seeding treatments affect native vegetation recovery over long periods of time...

In a warming climate, an intensifying fire regime and higher likelihood of extreme rain are expected to increase watershed sediment yield in many regions. Understanding regional variability in landscape response to fire and post-fire rainfall is essential for managing water resources and infrastructure. We measured sediment yield resulting from sequential wildfire and extreme rain and...

The Water-budget Accounting for Tropical Regions Model (WATRMod) code was used for Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Maui, and the Island of Hawaiʻi to estimate the spatial distribution of groundwater recharge, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and climatic water deficit for a set of water-budget scenarios. The scenarios included historical and future drought conditions, and a land-cover...

Determining effectiveness of restoration treatments is an important requirement of adaptive management, but it can be non-trivial where only portions of large and heterogeneous landscapes of concern can be treated and sampled. Bias and non-randomness in the spatial deployment of treatment and thus sampling is nearly unavoidable in the data available for large-scale management trials, and...

Background Linear fuel breaks are being implemented to moderate fire behavior and improve wildfire containment in semiarid landscapes such as the sagebrush steppe of North America, where extensive losses in perennial vegetation and ecosystem functioning are resulting from invasion by exotic annual grasses (EAGs) that foster large and recurrent wildfires. However, fuel-break construction...

Community-type conversions, such as replacement of perennials by exotic annual grasses in semiarid desert communities, are occurring due to plant invasions that often create positive plant–soil feedbacks, which favor invaders and make restoration of native perennials difficult. Exotic annual grass control measures, such as pre-emergent herbicides, can also alter soil ecosystems directly...

Context Plant communities vary both abruptly and gradually over time but differentiating between types of change can be difficult with existing classification and ordination methods. Structural topic modeling (STRUTMO), a text mining analysis, offers a flexible methodology for analyzing both types of temporal trends.Objectives Our objectives were to (1) identify post-fire dominant...

Fuel-treatments targeting shrubs and fire-prone exotic annual grasses (EAGs) are increasingly used to mitigate increased wildfire risks in arid and semiarid environments, and understanding their response to natural factors is needed for effective landscape management. Using field-data collected over four years from fuel-break treatments in semiarid sagebrush-steppe, we asked 1) how the...

The steep, tectonically active terrain along the Central California (USA) coast is well known to produce deadly and destructive debris flows. However, the extent to which fire affects debris-flow susceptibility in this region is an open question. We documented the occurrence of postfire debris floods and flows following the landfall of a storm that delivered intense rainfall across...

The historical role of fire in sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) landscapes remains poorly understood, yet is important to inform management and conservation of obligate species such as the threatened Gunnison Sage-grouse (GUSG; Centrocercus minimus). We reconstructed fire histories from tree-ring fire scars at sagebrush–forest ecotones (10 sites, 111 trees) to better understand the role...

Escalated wildfire activity within the western U.S. has widespread societal impacts and long-term consequences for the imperiled sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) biome. Shifts from historical fire regimes and the interplay between frequent disturbance and invasive annual grasses may initiate permanent state transitions as wildfire frequency outpaces sagebrush communities’ innate capacity to...

Context Addressing ecosystem degradation in the Anthropocene will require ecological restoration across large spatial extents. Identifying areas where natural regeneration will occur without direct resource investment will improve scalability of restoration actions.Objectives An ecoregion in need of large scale restoration is the Great Basin of the Western US, where increasingly large...