Assessments of climate sensitivity to projected greenhouse gas concentrations underpin environmental policy decisions, with such assessments primarily based on model simulations of climate during recent centuries and millennia.
My talk will refer to the value of Fitzroya forests from a scientific point of view (climate and fire records, productivity), the ecosystem services they deliver to society and their historic and cultural relevance. This as a basis to design and promote their conservation and restoration.
In arid and semi-arid regions a progressive decline of water resources will impact all socio-ecological and economic dynamics. The semi-arid region of north-central Chile has not been exempt from these climatic scenarios. The Choapa River flow records show an increase in the variability of the flow rates from 1985 and a constant decline in total discharge from 2002 to date. So the aim of this talk will be to present a 168 year hydro-climatic reconstruction of the Choapa River using Kagenekia angustifolia trees.
Charcoal analysis (anthracology) can be used to track the environmental transformation of the Northwestern France during the Holocene driven by natural factors and human activities. This work emphasizes the past forest management, the supply areas and the origin and evolution of the heathland and the bocage landscapes. In addition to the wood identification, for large fragments of charcoal, the growth ring width can be measured and the diameter of the original wood can be estimated.
There is an undisputed need to increase accuracy of snow cover estimation in regions comprised of complex terrain, especially in areas dependent on winter snow accumulation for a substantial portion of their annual water supply, such as the Western United States, Central Asia, and the Andes.
Grad students, faculty and staff are each given a couple of minutes to talk about their activities this past summer using no more than 3 slides. A wide variety of locations and activities will be described.
The onset of fire exclusion in the western United States began one of the largest and most effective landscape ecology experiments in human history. Structural and species changes to forests of western North America have transformed how these ecosystems now respond to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and may contribute to recent trends of more frequent high-severity wildfires and insect outbreaks.
Semi-arid forests are in a period of rapid transition as a result of unprecedented landscape scale fires, insect outbreaks, drought, and anthropogenic land use practices. Understanding how historically episodic disturbances led to coherent forest structural and spatial patterns that promoted resilience and resistance is a critical part of addressing change. Here I apply metabolic scaling theory (MST) to examine scaling behavior and structural patterns of semi-arid conifer forests in Arizona and New Mexico.
