Publications

The relative importance of nitrogen (N) deposition as a stressor to global forests is likely to increase in the future, as N deposition increases in Asia and Africa, and as sulfur declines more than nitrogen in Europe, the US, and Canada. Even so, it appears that decreased N deposition may not be sufficient to induce recovery, suggesting that management interventions may be necessary to...

The Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) is widely used to simulate the effects of climate, topography, land cover, and soils on landscape-level hydrologic responses and streamflow. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, developed procedures to apply the PRMS model to simulate the effects of...

Wildfire has been a constant presence on the Earth since at least the Silurian period, and is a landscape-scale catalyst that results in a step-change perturbation for hydrologic systems, which ripples across burned terrain, shaping the geomorphic legacy of watersheds. Specifically, wildfire alters two key landscape properties: (1) overland flow, and (2) soil erodibility. Overland flow...

This is a chapter in a technical report that is the second of two works describing longer-term actions to implement policies and strategies for preventing and suppressing rangeland fire and restoring rangeland landscapes affected by fire in the Western United States. The first part, Chambers et al 2017, "Science Framework for conservation and restoration of the sagebrush biome: Linking...

Fire is a necessary ecosystem process in many biomes and is best viewed as a natural disturbance that is beneficial to ecosystem functioning. However, increasingly we are seeing human interference in fire regimes that alter the historical range of variability for most fire parameters and result in vegetation shifts. Such perturbations can affect all fire regime parameters. Here we...

Exotic annual grasses are transforming native arid and semi-arid ecosystems globally by accelerating fire cycles that drive vegetation state changes. Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), a particularly widespread and aggressive exotic annual grass, is a key management target in national parks of the western United States due to its impacts on wildfire and biodiversity loss. Cheatgrass is known...

1. Wildfires are increasing in incidence and severity across the western US, leading to changes in forest structure and wildlife habitats. Knowledge of how species respond to fire-driven habitat changes in these landscapes is limited and generally disconnected from our understanding of adaptations that underpin responses to fire. 2. We aimed to identify relationships between fire regime

Fire regimes are now recognized as the product of social processes whereby fire on any landscape is the product of human-generated drivers: climate change, historical patterns of vegetation manipulation, invasive species, active fire suppression, ongoing fuel management efforts, prescribed burning, and accidental ignitions. We developed a new fire model (Social-Climate Related Pyrogenic

The current state of permafrost in Alaska and meaningful expectations for its future evolution are informed by long-term perspectives of previous permafrost degradation. Thermokarst processes in permafrost landscapes often lead to widespread lake formation and the spatial and temporal evolution of thermokarst lake landscapes reflects the combined effects of climate, ground conditions...

Residents in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) can play an important role in reducing wildfire’s negative effects by performing wildfire risk mitigation on their property. This report offers insight into the wildfire risk mitigation activities and related considerations, such as attitudes, experiences, and concern about wildfire, for people with homes in select communities in Montezuma...

Methods to detect and monitor the spread of invasive grasses are critical to avoid ecosystem transformations and large economic costs. The rapid spread of non‐native buffelgrass(Pennisetum ciliare) has intensified fire risk and is replacing fire intolerant native vegetation in the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern US. Coarse‐resolution satellite imagery has had limited success in...

About one-quarter of the water supply for the Village of Ruidoso, New Mexico, is derived from groundwater pumping along North Fork Eagle Creek in the Eagle Creek Basin near Alto, New Mexico. Because of concerns regarding the effects of groundwater pumping on surface-water hydrology in the Eagle Creek Basin and the effects of the 2012 Little Bear Fire, which resulted in substantial losses...