Tree-Ring Talk

Public land management agencies in the US have been shifting from top-down, command-and-control governance to models based on collaborative input from a variety of stakeholders. Stakeholder collaborative groups increasingly help define and prioritize land management policy and direction, assist in project implementation, and provide learning through adaptive monitoring efforts. Collaborative governance is increasingly seen as a means to build greater and more robust adaptive capacity of social, economic, and ecological systems, especially in the face of future impacts on ecosystems from climate change, increasingly severe wildfires and other disturbances, and human land use. In this talk, I outline how evidence of historical ranges of variability in fire and forest histories derived largely from dendroecological data sets have provided a crucial scientific foundation for collaborative governance in forests of the Front Range in Colorado. These efforts are directed primarily at reducing the ecological and social impacts of wildfires in montane forests where much of the wildland-urban interface is found, and that was historically characterized by frequent, low-intensity wildfires. I also provide examples from Mongolia and China of how models for collaborative governance based on dendroecological data are starting to be used within the context of current social, ecological, and economic realities.

Over the past two decades much of western North America experienced persistent drought with little to no respite. Consequences were widespread, including declines in river flow and reservoir storage, over-extraction of ground water, explosion of forest-fire activity, and massive bark beetle outbreaks. Water-balance calculations make clear that 2000–2018 was easily the driest 19-year period in the past century. To what degree if at all is human-caused climate change responsible and what is the future trajectory of water supply in western North America?

Abstract