Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Forest Sciences

The Potential for Fuel Reduction to Offset Climate Warming Impacts on Wildfire Intensity in California

Patrick T Brown, Scott Strenfel, Richard B. Bagley, et al.

Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability

Increasing fuel aridity due to climate warming has and will continue to increase wildfire danger in California. In addition to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary proposals for counteracting this increase in wildfire danger is a widespread expansion of hazardous fuel reductions. Here, we quantify the potential for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire intensity using [...]

Can land-use and land-cover change explain reduced resilience in forests?

Sara Alibakhshi, Leonardo Espinosa-Leal, Hossein Azadi

Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Forest Sciences

Generating signals of reduced resilience in ecosystems is crucial for conservation and management endeavors. However, the practical implications of such systems are still limited due to the lack of high-frequency data and uncertainties associated with predicting complex systems such as ecosystems. This study aims to investigate the potential of time series analysis of remote sensing data in [...]

Understanding Europe’s forest harvesting regimes

Susanne Suvanto, Adriane Esquivel Muelbert, Mart-Jan Schelhaas, et al.

Published: 2023-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations

The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]

Electric Circuit Theory as a method for monitoring tree water deficit at different scales

Georgios Xenakis

Published: 2023-07-11
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences

Climate change is expected to alter precipitation patterns, making droughts more frequent in some areas, which will expose trees to more severe water deficits which could result in the catastrophic collapse of their water transport system and, eventually, mortality. To inform forest management and tree species suitability to increase forest resilience requires a robust method for understanding [...]

A Climate Counternarrative: Dubious Carbon Accounting is Making a Canopy Problem Look Like an Energy Problem (for Consent and Profit)

Denis de Bernardy

Published: 2023-05-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Forest Sciences, Soil Science

The modern rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is man-made but driven by land stewardship changes rather than industrial activities like fossil fuels. Carbon cycle research fails to adequately convey surface-level interactions like plants soaking up carbon dioxide emitted near them. Clear-cutting a forest, for instance, produces a large plume of biogenic carbon dioxide that wind can carry away, [...]

Towards robust interdisciplinary modeling of global human-environmental dynamics

Carsten Meyer

Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations

Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]

Drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon from 2011-2020

Michel Valette, Yiannis Kountouris, Anna Freni Sterrantino, et al.

Published: 2022-10-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive [...]

A mid-20th century estimate of global vegetation carbon stocks based on inventory statistics

Manan Bhan, Patrick Meyfroidt, Sarah Matej, et al.

Published: 2022-03-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography

Biomass carbon stocks (BCS) play a vital role in the climate system, but benchmarked estimates prior to the late 20th century remain scarce. Here, by making use of an early global forest resource assessment and harmonizing information on land use and carbon densities, we establish a global BCS account for the year 1950. Our best-guess BCS estimate is 450.7 PgC (median of all modulations: 518.3 [...]

How to consider the effects of time of day, beam strength, and snow cover in ICESat-2 based estimation of boreal forest biomass?

Petri Varvia, Lauri Korhonen, André Bruguière, et al.

Published: 2022-01-10
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences

Spaceborne lidar sensors have potential to improve the accuracy of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates by providing direct measurements of 3D structure of forests over large spatial scales. The ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2), launched in 2018, provides a good coverage of the boreal forest zone and has been previously shown to provide good estimates of forest canopy [...]

Filtering ground noise from LiDAR returns produces inferior models of forest aboveground biomass in heterogenous landscapes

Michael J Mahoney, Lucas K Johnson, Eddie Bevilacqua, et al.

Published: 2021-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences

Airborne LiDAR has become an essential data source for large-scale, high-resolution modeling of forest aboveground biomass and carbon stocks, enabling predictions with much higher resolution and accuracy than can be achieved using optical imagery alone. Ground noise filtering – that is, excluding returns from LiDAR point clouds based on simple height thresholds – is a common practice meant to [...]

rassta: Raster-Based Spatial Stratification Algorithms

Bryan Andre Fuentes, Minerva Justine Dorantes, John Robert Tipton

Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences

Spatial stratification of landscapes allows for the development of efficient sampling surveys, the inclusion of domain knowledge in data-driven modeling frameworks, and the production of information relating the spatial variability of response phenomena to that of landscape processes. This work presents the rassta package as a collection of algorithms dedicated to the spatial stratification of [...]

Airborne laser scanning proxies of canopy light transmission in forests

Adam Michael Erickson, Nicholas Coops

Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Software Engineering, Statistics and Probability

Reliable estimates of canopy light transmission are critical to understanding the structure and function of vegetation communities but are difficult and costly to attain by traditional field inventory methods. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data uniquely provide multi-angular vertically resolved representation of canopy geometry across large geographic areas. While previous studies have proposed [...]

Bridging knowledge gaps with hybrid machine-learning forest ecosystem models (ML-FEMs): inferential simulation of past understory light regimes

Adam Michael Erickson, Craig Nistchke

Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences

Soil moisture is a key limiting factor of plant productivity in boreal and montane regions, producing additional climate feedbacks through evaporation, regeneration, mortality, and respiration. Understory solar irradiation – the primary driver of surface temperature and evaporative demand – remains poorly represented in vegetation models due to a lack of 3-D canopy geometry. Existing models are [...]

Simulated decline of a northern forest due to anthropogenic controls on the regeneration-mortality balance

Adam Michael Erickson, Craig Nistchke, Gordon Stenhouse

Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences

The population structure of forests is shaped by balancing the opposing forces of regeneration and mortality, each of which influence C turnover rates and are sensitive to climate. Regeneration underlies the migrational potential of forests to climatic change and remains underserved in modeling studies. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that warming may reduce tree regeneration rates while [...]

Emergence of anthropogenic fire regimes in the southern boreal of Canada

Adam Michael Erickson

Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

While radiative forcing and thus land surface temperatures have been shown to positively correlate with fire severity, precipitation, and lightning strike frequency, the effects of human activity on fire regimes remain difficult to disentangle from geophysical drivers given co-variation between these factors. Here, I analyze fire regimes in the 1919-2012 period across Canada and compare national [...]

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