Skip to main content
Advanced Search

Filters: Contacts: James Thorne (X)

8 results (145ms)   

Filters
Date Range
Extensions
Types
Contacts
Categories
Tag Types
Tag Schemes
View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV
thumbnail
Natural resource managers and researchers often need long-term averages of historical and future climate scenarios for their study area yet may not have the resources to make these summaries. This project will provide high quality, detailed maps of historical and projected future climate and hydrologic conditions for California and a finer scale version for southern California. The project will also assess the feasibility of expanding these reference data to the southwestern US and identify the most suitable online data portals for the public to view and analyze the data in support of local initiatives. The map products can be used to assess the impacts of ongoing climate change and to develop climate adaptation...
The impacts of different emission levels and climate change conditions to landscape-scale natural vegetation could have large repercussions for ecosystem services and environmental health. We forecast the risk-reduction benefits to natural landscapes of lowering business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions by comparing the extent and spatial patterns of climate exposure to dominant vegetation under current emissions trajectories (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP8.5) and envisioned Paris Accord target emissions (RCP4.5). This comparison allows us to assess the ecosystem value of reaching targets to keep global temperature warming under 2°C. Using 350,719 km2 of natural lands in California, USA, and the mapped...
Abstract (from Ecological Society of America): Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform postfire management in low elevation forests of California, USA, we collected 5‐year postfire recovery data from 1,234 study plots in 19 wildfires that burned from 2004–2012 and 18 years of seed production data from 216 seed fall traps (1999–2017). We used this data in conjunction...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
thumbnail
In 2017, California was experiencing its most severe drought in over a millennia. Low rainfall and record high temperatures resulted in increased tree mortality and complete forest diebacks across the West. Though land managers scrambled to respond, they lacked information needed to make informed decisions. Focusing on California’s central and southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, this project seeks to determine whether a key forest management practice – forest thinning via prescribed fire – can help forests better survive drought. Prescribed fire is commonly used in the western U.S. to remove potential wildfire fuel, such as small trees and shrubs. It is also thought that this act of selectively removing trees helps...
Postfire Spatial Conifer Restoration Planning Tool (POSCRPT) R package (and web version) predicts the probability of post-fire conifer regeneration for fire data supplied by the user. The predictive model was fit using presence/absence data collected five years after wildfire, from 1,234 4.4m radius plots (60m2), spanning 19 wildfires in California. Please refer to Stewart et al. (2020) for more details. The poscrptR tool is designed to simplify the process of predicting post-fire conifer regeneration under different precipitation and seed production scenarios. The app was designed to use Rapid Assessment of Vegetative Condition (RAVG) data inputs. The RAVG website has both RdNBR and fire perimeter data sets...
Abstract (from Conservation Science and Practice): Climate change uncertainty poses serious challenges to conservation efforts. One emerging conservation strategy is to identify and conserve climate change refugia: areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change that enable persistence of valued resources. This management paradigm may be pursued at broad scales by leveraging existing resources and placing them into a tangible framework to stimulate further collaboration that fosters management decision-making. Here, we describe a framework for moving toward operationalizing climate change refugia conservation at an ecoregion scale with an analysis for the Sierra Nevada ecoregion (CA, USA). Structured...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform postfire management in low elevation forests of California, USA, we collected 5‐yr postfire recovery data from 1,234 study plots in 19 wildfires that burned from 2004–2012 and 18 yrs of seed production data from 216 seed fall traps (1999–2017). We used these data in conjunction with spatially extensive climate, topography,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
thumbnail
The Southwest U.S. is experiencing hotter droughts, which are contributing to more frequent, severe wildfires. These droughts also stress vegetation, which can make it more difficult for forests to recover after fire. Forest regeneration in burned areas may be limited because seeds have to travel long distances to recolonize, and when they do arrive, conditions are often unfavorably hot and dry. Conifer forests in the region have demonstrated particular difficulty in recovering after fires, and in some cases have transformed into other ecosystem types, such as deciduous-dominated forests or grasslands. Such ecological transformations have implications not only for the plants and animals that depend on conifer forests...
    map background search result map search result map Can Prescribed Fire Help Forests Survive Drought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains? Post-Fire Conifer Regeneration Under a Warming Climate: Will Severe Fire Be a Catalyst for Forest Loss? Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Can Prescribed Fire Help Forests Survive Drought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains? Post-Fire Conifer Regeneration Under a Warming Climate: Will Severe Fire Be a Catalyst for Forest Loss? Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California