Benjamin Sleeter

Large areas of forest in the tropics have been cleared and converted to pastureland. Hawai‘i Island is no exception, with over 100,000 ha of historically forested land now dominated by non-native grasses. Passive forest restoration has been unsuccessful because these grasslands tend to persist even after grazers have been removed, yet active outplanting of native tree species can be cost

Global land-use/land-cover (LULC) change projections and historical datasets are typically available at coarse grid resolutions and are often incompatible with modeling applications at local to regional scales. The difficulty of downscaling and reapportioning global gridded LULC change projections to regional boundaries is a barrier to the use of these datasets in a state-and-transition...

Spatially-explicit state-and-transition simulation models of land use and land cover (LULC) increase our ability to assess regional landscape characteristics and associated carbon dynamics across multiple scenarios. By characterizing appropriate spatial attributes such as forest age and land-use distribution, a state-and-transition model can more effectively simulate the pattern and...

Human land use will increasingly contribute to habitat loss and water shortages in California, given future population projections and associated land-use demand. Understanding how land-use change may impact future water use and where existing protected areas may be threatened by land-use conversion will be important if effective, sustainable management approaches are to be implemented...

Context In addition to biodiversity conservation, California rangelands generate multiple ecosystem services including livestock production, drinking and irrigation water, and carbon sequestration. California rangeland ecosystems have experienced substantial conversion to residential land use and more intensive agriculture. Objectives To understand the potential impacts to rangeland...

The dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM) MC2 was run over the conterminous USA at 30 arc sec (~800 m) to simulate the impacts of nine climate futures generated by 3GCMs (CSIRO, MIROC and CGCM3) using 3 emission scenarios (A2, A1B and B1) in the context of the LandCarbon national carbon sequestration assessment. It first simulated potential vegetation dynamics from coast to coast...

Increased land-use intensity (e.g. clearing of forests for cultivation, urbanization), often results in the loss of ecosystem carbon storage, while changes in productivity resulting from climate change may either help offset or exacerbate losses. However, there are large uncertainties in how land and climate systems will evolve and interact to shape future ecosystem carbon dynamics. To...

Background Climate change and the concurrent change in wildfire events and land use comprehensively affect carbon dynamics in both spatial and temporal dimensions. The purpose of this study was to project the spatial and temporal aspects of carbon storage in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) under these changes from 2006 to 2050. We selected three emission scenarios and produced...

We examined opportunities for avoided loss of wetland carbon stocks in the Great Plains of the United States in the context of future agricultural expansion through analysis of land-use land-cover (LULC) change scenarios, baseline carbon datasets and biogeochemical model outputs. A wetland map that classifies wetlands according to carbon pools was created to describe future patterns of...

The U.S. Geological Survey Land Cover Trends Project is releasing a 1973–2000 time-series land-use/land-cover dataset for the conterminous United States. The dataset contains 5 dates of land-use/land-cover data for 2,688 sample blocks randomly selected within 84 ecological regions. The nominal dates of the land-use/land-cover maps are 1973, 1980, 1986, 1992, and 2000. The land-use/land...

Anthropogenic land use will likely present a greater challenge to biodiversity than climate change this century in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Even if species are equipped with the adaptive capacity to migrate in the face of a changing climate, they will likely encounter a human-dominated landscape as a major dispersal obstacle. Our goal was to identify, at the ecoregion-level, protected...

Information on future land-use and land-cover (LULC) change is needed to analyze the impact of LULC change on ecological processes. The U.S. Geological Survey has produced spatially explicit, thematically detailed LULC projections for the conterminous United States. Four qualitative and quantitative scenarios of LULC change were developed, with characteristics consistent with the...