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Abstract (from Ecological Applications): Increasing aridity is a challenge for forest managers and reducing stand density to minimize competition is a recognized strategy to mitigate drought impacts on growth. In many dry forests, the most widespread and common forest management programs currently being implemented focus on restoration of historical stand structures, primarily to minimize fire risk and enhance watershed function. The implications of these restoration projects for drought vulnerability are not well understood. Here, we examined how planned restoration treatments in the Four Forests Restoration Initiative, the largest forest restoration project in the United States, would alter landscape‐scale patterns...
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The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using proactive forest management (e.g. forest thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning) to mitigate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests. To estimate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in western United States (US) conifer forests, we used a generalizable framework to evaluate interactions among wildfire hazard and carbon exposure and vulnerability. By evaluating where high social adaptive capacity for proactive forest management overlaps with carbon most vulnerable to wildfire-caused carbon loss, we identified opportunity hot spots for reducing the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss. We found that relative to...
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BACKGROUND: While freshwater sustainability is generally defined as the provisioning of water for both people and the environment, in practice it is largely focused only on supplying water to furnish human population growth. Symptomatic of this is the state of Arizona, where rapid growth outside of the metropolitan Phoenix-Tucson corridor relies on the same groundwater that supplies year-round flow in rivers. Using Arizona as a case study, we present the first study in the southwestern United States that evaluates the potential impact of future population growth and water demand on streamflow depletion across multiple watersheds. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We modeled population growth and water demand through...
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