The Role of Climate Change in Interpreting Historical Variability

Stand structure in eastside old-growth ponderosa pine forests of Oregon and northern California

“…Our work provides managers an important description of natural variability that may aid in understanding historic conditions, a description of conditions in stands that are dramatically under represented across the landscape, and a set of conditions that may serve as a reference for setting regional management goals (Landres et al, 1999). Clearly, establishment of these reference conditions has inherent limitations; even our current understanding of eastside old-growth ponderosa pine may be of limited relevance today without considering the conditions within the context of climate changes (Millar and Woolfenden, 1999). Despite this limitation, our reference conditions represent the accumulated structure that has been influenced by past climatic events rather than a static condition at a single point in time (Zulé et al, 2002).…”

Influence of humans and climate on the fire history of a ponderosa pine-mixed conifer forest in the southeastern Klamath Mountains, California

“…Considerable variation in climate has occurred over the past few centuries (Dettinger et al, 1998;Swetnam and Betancourt, 1998;Millar and Wolfenden, 1999), which have likely led to important changes in aspects of fire regimes (Swetnam, 1993). It is uncertain if similar prehistorical conditions would have existed today under different climatic regimes and in the absence of fire suppression (Stine, 1996;Donnegan et al, 2001;Stephens et al, 2003;Wright and Agee, 2004).…”

Forest vegetation change in southeast Ohio: Do older forests serve as useful models for predicting the successional trajectory of future forests?

“…Despite the abundant literature discussing the problems with using remnant or reconstructed old-growth and or mature second-growth forests to predict future forest composition and structure this process is still used to develop management guidelines in many forest types (Kupfer and Franklin, 2000;Leathwick, 2001;Dai et al, 2003;Palik et al, 2003; and see discussions in Goebel and Hix, 1996;Fule et al, 1997;Hix and Pearcy, 1997;Mast et al, 1999;Millar and Wolfenden, 1999;www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco Forest Ecology and Management 223 (2006) 200-210 Hobbs and Harris, 2001;Allen et al, 2002;Fule et al, 2002). In this paper we tested the hypothesis that future vegetation patterns can be predicted based solely on the abiotic site characteristics of old-growth forest remnants.…”