Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, an Ecoss team led by Xanthe Walker and Michelle Mack announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada […]
Wildfire is an important ecological disturbance that can have cascading effects on ecosystem carbon (C) fluxes. Ecosystem respiration (ER) and soil respiration (SR) account for two of the largest terrestrial C fluxes to the atmosphere, and they play critical roles in regulating C?climate feedbacks. Here, the responses of ER, SR […]
Land managers frequently apply vegetation removal and seeding treatments to restore ecosystem function following woody plant encroachment, invasive species spread, and wildfire. However, the long-term outcome of these treatments is unclear due to a lack of widespread monitoring. We quantified how vegetation removal (via wildfire or management) with or without […]
Increasing wildfire activity in Alaska’s boreal forests has led to greater fuel-reduction management. Management has been implemented to reduce wildfire spread, but the ecological impacts of these practices are poorly known. We quantified the effects of hand-thinning and shearblading on above- and belowground stand characteristics, plant species composition, carbon (C) and […]
Ecoss ecologist Ted Schuur, who’s received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a carbon observatory at Eight Mile Lake near Denali National Park in Alaska, calls the permafrost’s massive release of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere a “wild card,” and potentially a tipping point, […]
Climate warming and drying is associated with increased wildfire disturbance and the emergence of megafires in North American boreal forests. Changes to the fire regime are expected to strongly increase combustion emissions of carbon (C) which could alter regional C balance and positively feedback to climate warming. In order to […]
Satellite derived vegetation indices (VIs) are broadly used in ecological research, ecosystem modeling, and land surface monitoring. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), perhaps the most utilized VI, has countless applications across ecology, forestry, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity, and other disciplines. Calculating satellite derived NDVI is not always straight-forward, however, as […]
Increasing wildfire activity in Alaska’s boreal forests has led to greater fuel reduction management. Management has been implemented to reduce wildfire spread, but the ecological impacts of these practices are poorly known. We quantified the effects of handthinning and shearblading on above- and belowground stand characteristics, plant species composition, carbon […]
Climate change is expected to increase the extent and severity of wildfires throughout the boreal forest. Historically, black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.) forests in interior Alaska have been relatively free of non-native species, but the compounding effects of climate change and an altered fire regime could facilitate the expansion of […]
How healthy will Earth’s ecosystems be in 2027, 2067 and beyond? It’s an important question to ask, especially on World Environment Day, June 5. To find answers, scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network came together this spring at an NSF LTER mini-symposium. “Arctic […]