Richard Pelltier
Science and Products
Past Perspectives of Water in the West
In the intermountain west, seasonal precipitation extremes, combined with population growth, are creating new challenges for the management of water resources, ecosystems, and geologic hazards. This research contributes a comprehensive long-term context for a deeper understanding of past hydrologic variability, including the magnitude and frequency of drought and flood extremes and ecosystem...
Exploring Future Flora, Environments, and Climates Through Simulations (EFFECTS)
Climate changes can significantly affect species and ecosystems. Historical and paleoenvironmental data record species and ecosystem responses to past climate changes, but these records become sparse as one goes further back in time. Model simulations can be used fill the spatial and temporal gaps in observed records to improve our understanding of the potential magnitude, rate, and spatial...
Projected future vegetation changes for the northwest United States and southwest Canada at a fine spatial resolution using a dynamic global vegetation model.
Future climate change may significantly alter the distributions of many plant taxa. The effects of climate change may be particularly large in mountainous regions where climate can vary significantly with elevation. Understanding potential future vegetation changes in these regions requires methods that can resolve vegetation responses to climate...
Shafer, Sarah; Bartlein, Patrick J.; Gray, Elizabeth M.; Pelltier, Richard T.
Atlas of relations between climatic parameters and distributions of important trees and shrubs in North America: Revisions for all taxa from the United States and Canada and new taxa from the western United States
This is the seventh volume in an atlas series that explores the relations between the geographic distributions of woody plant species and climatic variables in North America. A 25-kilometer (km) equal-area grid of modern climatic and bioclimatic variables was constructed from weather data. The geographic distributions of selected tree and shrub...
Thompson, Robert S.; Anderson, Katherine H.; Pelltier, Richard T.; Strickland, Laura E.; Shafer, Sarah L.; Bartlein, Patrick J.; McFadden, Andrew K.
Atlas of relations between climatic parameters and distributions of important trees and shrubs in North America—Modern data for climatic estimation from vegetation inventories
Vegetation inventories (plant taxa present in a vegetation assemblage at a given site) can be used to estimate climatic parameters based on the identification of the range of a given parameter where all taxa in an assemblage overlap ("Mutual Climatic Range"). For the reconstruction of past climates from fossil or subfossil plant assemblages, we...
Thompson, Robert S.; Anderson, Katherine H.; Pelltier, Richard T.; Strickland, Laura E.; Shafer, Sarah L.; Bartlein, Patrick J. Quantitative estimation of climatic parameters from vegetation data in North America by the mutual climatic range technique
The mutual climatic range (MCR) technique is perhaps the most widely used method for estimating past climatic parameters from fossil assemblages, largely because it can be conducted on a simple list of the taxa present in an assemblage. When applied to plant macrofossil data, this unweighted approach (MCRun) will frequently identify a large range...
Anderson, Katherine H.; Bartlein, Patrick J.; Strickland, Laura E.; Pelltier, Richard T.; Thompson, Robert S.; Shafer, Sarah L.
Atlas of relations between climatic parameters and distributions of important trees and shrubs in North America: Ecoregions of North America
Climate is the primary factor controlling the continental-scale distribution of plant species, although the relations between climatic parameters and species' ranges are only now beginning to be quantified. This volume examines the relations between climate and the distributions of (1) Kuchler's 'potential natural vegetation' categories for the 48...
Thompson, Robert S.; Anderson, Katherine H.; Pelltier, Richard T.; Shafer, Sarah L.; Bartlein, Patrick J.
Atlas of Relations Between Climatic Parameters and Distributions of Important Trees and Shrubs in North America - Alaska Species and Ecoregions
Climate is the primary factor in controlling the continental-scale distribution of plant species, although the relations between climatic parameters and species' ranges is only now beginning to be quantified. Preceding volumes of this atlas explored the continental-scale relations between climatic parameters and the distributions of woody plant...
Thompson, Robert S.; Anderson, Katherine H.; Strickland, Laura E.; Shafer, Sarah L.; Pelltier, Richard T.; Bartlein, Patrick J.