Western Mountain Initiative — New Mexico

Research Task: BB06DN7.2.2
Task Manager: Craig Allen

Mountain ecosystems of the western U.S. provide irreplaceable goods and services such as water, wood, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities, but their potential responses to anticipated climatic changes are poorly understood. The overarching objective of the Western Mountain Initiative (WMI) is to understand and predict the responses—emphasizing sensitivities, thresholds, resistance, and resilience—of western mountain ecosystems to climatic variability and change. Objectives of this task include (1) elucidating centennial- to millennial-length shifts in past vegetation and fire regimes; (2) determining responses of fire to short-term (annual to decadal) climatic variation; (3) elucidating long- and short-term climatic controls of tree mortality, including thresholds for dieback; and (4) determining the effects of climatic variability, fire, and land use on watershed runoff and erosion processes. FORT scientists also will continue documenting rapid and extensive climate-induced vegetation mortality, assembling information on global patterns and processes of drought and heat-induced forest die-off, and conducting long-term ecohydrological research in the Frijolito Watershed in Bandelier National Monument.

 For more information contact Craig Allen

Related Products

Publications

• Projected future changes in vegetation in western North America in the 21st century
• Quantifying tree mortality in a mixed species woodland using multitemporal high spatial resolution satellite imagery
• Temperature as a potent driver of regional forest drought stress and tree mortality
• Salvage logging versus the use of burnt wood as a nurse object to promote post-fire tree seedling establishment
• Climate-Induced Tree Mortality: Earth System Consequences
• A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests
• Growth, carbon-isotope discrimination, and drought-associated mortality across a Pinus ponderosa elevational transect
• Forest responses to increasing aridity and warmth in the southwestern United States
• Options for National Parks and Reserves for adapting to climate change
• Bark beetle outbreaks in Western North America: Causes and consequences
• A conceptual framework for dryland aeolian sediment transport along the grassland–forest continuum: Effects of woody plant canopy cover and disturbance
• Tree die-off in response to global-change-type drought: Mortality insights from a decade of plant water potential measurements
• Thresholds of climate change in Ecosystems: Final Report, Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.2
• Paired charcoal and tree-ring records of high-frequency fire from two New Mexico bog sites
• Development of the mixed conifer forest in northern New Mexico and its relationship to Holocene environmental change
• Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: Why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?
• Climate-induced forest dieback as an emergent global phenomenon
• A stand-replacing fire history in upper montane forests of the southern Rocky Mountains
• Climate change and disturbance interactions
• Historical and modern disturbance regimes of Pinon-Juniper vegetation in the western U.S
• Landscape ecology--a concept for protecting park resources