Climate Dipoles as Continental Drivers of Plant and Animal Populations

Zuckerberg, Benjamin; Strong, Courtenay; LaMontagne, Jalene M.; George, Scott St.; Betancourt, Julio L.; Koenig, Walter D.

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2020.01.010

Cited by 41 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 121 publications

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“…The temporal dynamics of climatic dipoles unfold on interannual to decadal timescales (24), which compels us to broaden the temporal lens at which we examine postfire recovery. Although there are growing efforts to examine juvenile recruitment at extended intervals since fire, much postfire sampling occurs soon after fire.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This means that postfire trajectories are not only dependent on local context, but they are also embedded within synoptic climate dynamics that operate at much larger scales. This broader context is temporally coherent, even if characterized by internal contrasts (24,57). When broader contexts are obscured, we risk detecting artifacts of scale instead of actual ecological patterns (58).…”

Section: Nrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the influence of the temporal variability associated with particular phases of climatic modes (e.g., ENSO) has been demonstrated in forest and fire ecology (e.g., refs. [21][22][23], the implications of climatic dipoles per se on ecological dynamics is a nascent area of inquiry (24). For example, Strong et al (25) correlated two modes of North American boreal bird irruptions with climatic dipoles.…”

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confidence: 99%

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A climatic dipole drives short- and long-term patterns of postfire forest recovery in the western United States

Littlefield

Dobrowski

Abatzoglou

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Researchers are increasingly examining patterns and drivers of postfire forest recovery amid growing concern that climate change and intensifying fires will trigger ecosystem transformations. Diminished seed availability and postfire drought have emerged as key constraints on conifer recruitment. However, the spatial and temporal extent to which recurring modes of climatic variability shape patterns of postfire recovery remain largely unexplored. Here, we identify a north–south dipole in annual climatic moisture deficit anomalies across the Interior West of the US and characterize its influence on forest recovery from fire. We use annually resolved establishment models from dendrochronological records to correlate this climatic dipole with short-term postfire juvenile recruitment. We also examine longer-term recovery trajectories using Forest Inventory and Analysis data from 989 burned plots. We show that annual postfire ponderosa pine recruitment probabilities in the northern Rocky Mountains (NR) and the southwestern US (SW) track the strength of the dipole, while declining overall due to increasing aridity. This indicates that divergent recovery trajectories may be triggered concurrently across large spatial scales: favorable conditions in the SW can correspond to drought in the NR that inhibits ponderosa pine establishment, and vice versa. The imprint of this climatic dipole is manifest for years postfire, as evidenced by dampened long-term likelihoods of juvenile ponderosa pine presence in areas that experienced postfire drought. These findings underscore the importance of climatic variability at multiple spatiotemporal scales in driving cross-regional patterns of forest recovery and have implications for understanding ecosystem transformations and species range dynamics under global change.

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nrmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A climatic dipole drives short- and long-term patterns of postfire forest recovery in the western United States

Littlefield

Dobrowski

Abatzoglou

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Among-site synchrony is measured as crosscorrelation of seed production among study plots, and ranges from regional to continental scales [55,58]. This scale is relevant for satiating mobile generalist seed predators [14], and has the potential to push and pull ecosystem dynamics at regional scales [59,60]. Theory suggests that regionally correlated weather variation (the Moran effect) is the main driver of synchronized seed production at this spatial scale [12].…”

Section: Synchronymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Trophic consequences of changes in synchrony are potentially substantial but remain unexplored. They include effects on animal migrations [60,73], the ability to produce regional risk forecasts of spread of Lyme disease and hantavirus by rodents dependent on mast [74], and the planning of management and conservation actions in mastingdominated systems [75].…”

Section: Synchronymentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change

Hacket‐Pain¹,

Bogdziewicz²

2021

Preprint

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Climate change is reshaping global vegetation through its impacts on plant mortality, but recruitment creates the next generation of plants and will determine the structure and composition of future communities. Recruitment depends on mean seed production, but also on the interannual variability and among-plant synchrony in seed production, the phenomenon known as mast seeding. Thus, predicting the long-term response of global vegetation dynamics to climate change requires understanding the response of masting to changing climate. Recently, data and methods have become available allowing the first assessments of long-term changes in masting. Reviewing the literature, we evaluate evidence for a fingerprint of climate change on mast seeding and discuss the drivers and impacts of these changes. We divide our discussion into the main characteristics of mast seeding: interannual variation, synchrony, temporal autocorrelation, and mast frequency. Data indicate that masting patterns, are changing, but the direction of that change varies, likely reflecting the diversity of proximate factors underlying masting across taxa. Experiments to understand the proximate mechanisms underlying masting, in combination with the analysis of long-term datasets, will enable us to understand this observed variability in the response of masting. This will allow us to predict future shifts in masting patterns, and consequently ecosystem impacts of climate change via its impacts on masting.

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Trends in land surface phenology across the conterminous United States (1982‐2016) analyzed by NEON domains

Liang

Henebry

Liu

et al. 2021

Ecological Applications

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Tracking phenological change in a regionally explicit context is a key to understanding ecosystem status and change. The current study investigated long‐term trends of satellite‐observed land surface phenology (LSP) in the 17 National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) domains across the conterminous United States (CONUS). Characterization of LSP trends was based on a high temporal resolution (3‐d) time series of the two‐band enhanced vegetation index (EVI2) derived from a long‐term data record (LTDR) of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). We identified significant trend patterns in LSP and their seasonal climate and land use/land cover drivers for each NEON domain. Key findings include (1) the start of season (SOS) predominantly shifted later in 13 out of 17 domains (24.3% of CONUS by area) due potentially to both a lack of spring warming in the eastern United States and changes in agronomic practices over agricultural lands; (2) the end of season (EOS) became predominantly later in nine domains dominated by natural vegetation (14.1% of CONUS by area) in response to widespread warming in autumn; (3) the EOS predominantly shifted earlier in three domains (10.6% of CONUS by area) over primarily agricultural lands as potentially affected by changes in crop growth cycles; and (4) earlier shift in the SOS was mostly found in the Northwest (3.6% of CONUS by area) and was predominant only in the moist Pacific Northwest (27.7% of the domain by area) in response to more pronounced spring warming in the region. The overall patterns of SOS and EOS trends across CONUS appeared constrained by continental‐scale temperature trends as characterized by a west‐east dipole and the distribution of the nation's agricultural lands. In addition, seasonal trend analysis revealed that most NEON domains (15/17) became predominantly greener in part of or throughout the growing season, potentially contributed by both climate change‐induced growth increase and improved agricultural productivity. The domain‐wide LSP trends with their underlying drivers identified here provide important contextual information for NEON science as well as for investigations within CONUS using other distributed observatories (e.g., LTER, LTAR, FLUXNET, USA‐NPN, etc.).

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Climate Dipoles as Continental Drivers of Plant and Animal Populations

Cited by 41 publications

References 121 publications

A climatic dipole drives short- and long-term patterns of postfire forest recovery in the western United States

A climatic dipole drives short- and long-term patterns of postfire forest recovery in the western United States

Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change

Trends in land surface phenology across the conterminous United States (1982‐2016) analyzed by NEON domains

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