Scientist Emeritus
Email:
jlbetanc@usgs.gov
Office Phone:
703-648-5840
Fax:
703-648-6699
ORCID:
0000-0002-7165-0743
Location
12201 Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston
, VA
20192-0002
US
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Ecosystems are changing worldwide and critical decisions that affect ecosystem health and sustainability are being made every day. As ecologists, we have a responsibility to ensure that these decisions are made with access to the best available science. However, to bring this idea into practice, ecology needs to make a substantial leap forward towards becoming a more predictive science. Furthermore, even for basic, conceptual questions there is a lot to be gained by addressing problems from a forecasting perspective, with more frequent data-model comparisons helping to highlight misunderstandings and reframe long-standing questions. Ecological forecasting is occurring across a wide range of ecological sub-disciplines,...
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Originally, we had two primary objectives for this project: (1) To study North Pacific Jet (NPJ) climatology on interannual to decadal time scales by (a) extending the instrumental NPJ period back in time based on Twentieth Century Re-analysis data and (b) by developing a tree-ring based reconstruction of the winter NPJ position. (2). To analyze the influence of NPJ position on Sierra Nevada (SN) fire regimes. For this purpose, we planned to use historical SN fire regime data to establish a pre-settlement NPJ-fire relationship and recent annual area burned data to determine whether this relationship persists into the 21st century. We have reached objective 1a in a study of twentieth century NPJ climatology (Belmecheri...
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THE RISING RISK OF DROUGHT. Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). For example, the “Millennium Drought”...
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Abstract (from One Earth): Novel forms of drought are emerging globally, due to climate change, shifting teleconnection patterns, expanding human water use, and a history of human influence on the environment that increases the probability of transformational ecological impacts. These costly ecological impacts cascade to human communities, and understanding this changing drought landscape is one of today’s grand challenges. By using a modified horizon-scanning approach that integrated scientists, managers, and decision-makers, we identified the emerging issues in ecological drought that represent key challenges to timely and effective responses. Here we review the themes that most urgently need attention, including...
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Abstract (from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070454): Managers of protected natural areas increasingly are confronted with novel ecological conditions and conflicting objectives to preserve the past while fostering resilience for an uncertain future. This dilemma may be pronounced at range peripheries where rates of change are accelerated and ongoing invasions often are perceived as threats to local ecosystems. We provide an example from City of Rocks National Reserve (CIRO) in southern Idaho, positioned at the northern range periphery of pinyon-juniper (P-J) woodland. Reserve managers are concerned about P-J woodland encroachment into adjacent sagebrush steppe, but the rates...
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