Fire History Across Forest Types in the Southern Beartooth Mountains, Wyoming

Brown, Sabrina R.; Baysinger, Ashley; Brown, Peter M.; Cheek, Justin; Diez, Jeffrey M.; Gentry, Christopher M.; Grant, Thomas A.; Jacques, Jeannine‐Marie St.; Jordan, David A.; Leef, Morgan L.; Rourke, M. K.; Speer, James H.; Spradlin, Carrie E.; Stevens, Jens T.; Stone, Jeffery R.; Winkle, Brian Van; Kichas, Nickolas E.

doi:10.3959/trr2018-11

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Disturbances range from finescale, such as geomorphological changes, to broad-scale drought events driven by climate and intensive land-use management interventions in this region and across the western United States through centuries [39,40]. The study site did not experience any severe canopy replacing fire events after 1900 during the period of this study, as shown by a fire history study by Brown et al [41].…”

Section: Regime Shift In Ndvi From 1906 To 2015mentioning

confidence: 53%

Fine-Scale NDVI Reconstruction Back to 1906 from Tree-Rings in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Thapa

Speer

2021

Forests

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Global warming and related disturbances, such as drought, water, and heat stress, are causing forest decline resulting in regime shifts. Conventional studies have combined tree-ring width (TRW) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to reconstruct NDVI values and ignored the influences of mixed land covers. We built an integrated TRW-NDVI model and reconstructed the annual NDVI maps by using 622 Landsat satellite images and tree cores from 15 plots using point-by-point regression. Our model performed well in the study area, as demonstrated by significant reconstructions for 71.14% (p < 0.05) of the area with the exclusion of water and barren areas. The error rate between the reconstructed NDVI using the conventional approach and our approach could reach 10.36%. The 30 m resolution reconstructed NDVI images in the recent 100 years clearly displayed a decrease in vegetation density and detected decades-long regime shifts from 1906 to 2015. Our study site experienced five regime shifts, markedly the 1930s and 1950s, which were megadroughts across North America. With fine resolution maps, regime shifts could be observed annually at the centennial scale. They can also be used to understand how the Yellowstone ecosystem has gradually changed with its ecological legacies in the last century.

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Section: Regime Shift In Ndvi From 1906 To 2015mentioning

confidence: 53%

Fine-Scale NDVI Reconstruction Back to 1906 from Tree-Rings in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Thapa

Speer

2021

Forests

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“…However, Schrag et al (2008) modeled a decrease in treeline P. albicaulis under climate change scenarios of a 4.5°C increase in temperature and a 35% increase in precipitation, suggesting a climate envelope that would eventually inhibit expansion at treeline. We also suspect that 20th century fire suppression played a role in limiting fire in the region that encouraged greater seedling establishment rates in our transects during this period (Brown et al, 2020). The lack of fire may have also played a role in the ecotone shift we observed because young trees are unlikely to survive fire of any severity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Drivers of forest change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Blomdahl

Speer

Kaye

et al. 2022

J Vegetation Science

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Questions: Global climate change is predicted to cause widespread shifts in the distribution and composition of forests, particularly in mountain environments where climate exerts strong controls on tree community arrangement. The upslope movement of vegetation has been observed in association with warming temperatures and is especially evident in ecotones-the transition zones between vegetation types. We explored the role of drought and tree mortality on recent changes in high-elevation forests.

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“…Dendrochronology is a well-established science initially proposed by Andrew Ellicott Douglass at the beginnings of the 20 th century and that provides estimates of both the annual growth of woody plants and other environmentally relevant information through the analysis of physical or chemical properties of tree-ring wood (Bannister, 1963; Coulthard and Smith, 2013; Fritts, 1976; Fritts et al, 1965; Shroder, 1976; Smith and Lewis, 2006). Tree-ring methods have been applied across many different disciplines, including archaeology, for example, dendroprovenancing (Cherubini, 2021; Cherubini et al, 2022; Domínguez-Delmás, 2020; Wilson et al, 2017), environmental reconstructions including hydroclimatic parameters, such as temperature (Aryal et al, 2020) and precipitation (Tejedor et al, 2020), streamflow (Akkemik et al, 2008), floods (Speer et al, 2019), droughts (He et al, 2018) and events such as snow avalanches (Laxton and Smith, 2009; Luckman, 2010; Yadav and Bhutiyani, 2013), landslides (Chalupová et al, 2020), forest fires (Brown et al, 2020), air pollution episodes (Ballikaya et al, 2022; McLaughlin et al, 2002), insect outbreaks (Büntgen et al, 2009) and fungal attacks (Cherubini et al, 2002, 2021). Tree-ring based environmental reconstructions have two major advantages.…”

Section: Himalayan Dendrochronologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tree-ring hydrological research in the Himalaya: State of the art and future directions

Islam,

Vennemann,

Büntgen

et al. 2024

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

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Recent developments in tree-ring research offer great potential for reconstructing past climate changes; determining the frequencies of natural hazards; and assessing the availability of freshwater resources over timescales that extend well into the pre-instrumental period. Here, we review the state of dendrochronological research in the Himalaya and outline future directions for tree-ring-based hydrological reconstructions in a region that has a pressing societal need to understand the causes and consequences of past, present and future changes in the hydrological cycle. We used ‘tree ring’ and ‘Himalaya’ as keywords to identify scholarly articles from the Web of Science that were published between 1994 and 2022. The resulting 173 publications were separated by their spatial coverage into the western, central and eastern Himalaya, as well as their scientific purpose (e.g. reconstructing growth-climate relationships, temperature, precipitation, streamflow, floods, droughts, etc.). Our analysis shows that dendrochronological research in the Himalaya primarily focused on understanding growth-climate relationships using annual tree-ring widths measurements obtained for coniferous species, and their application in climate reconstructions. Reconstructions of hydrological processes such as streamflows, and extremes such as glacial and landslide lake outburst floods, have received less attention. Recent advances in dendrochronology, including blue intensity (BI), quantitative wood anatomy (QWA), and tree-ring stable isotopes (TRSI) should be combined to improve the resolution and accuracy of hydrological reconstructions in all parts of the Himalaya. Such studies may allow us to better understand the effects of climate change and the Himalayan water resources for its lowland surroundings. They may also facilitate decision-making processes for mitigating the impacts of climate change on natural hazards, and for better managing water resources in the region.

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Fire History Across Forest Types in the Southern Beartooth Mountains, Wyoming

Cited by 9 publications

References 50 publications

Fine-Scale NDVI Reconstruction Back to 1906 from Tree-Rings in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Fine-Scale NDVI Reconstruction Back to 1906 from Tree-Rings in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Drivers of forest change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Tree-ring hydrological research in the Himalaya: State of the art and future directions

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