High Elevation Gardening Web Log "Blog"

Abstract:

There is an increasing body of evidence that hydro-climatic changes in the Western U.S. are occurring, are related to global warming, and are beginning to impact forest ecosystems. Rising trends in wildfire, drought-induced tree mortality, and bark beetle outbreaks are the
clearest indicators so far of a climate linkage. A number of non-climatic contributing factors, however, make it difficult to identify the magnitude of the role of climate variability and change.
These other factors include ecosystem changes due to a century of land uses (e.g., livestock grazing, fire suppression, forest harvesting, etc.), invasive species, and increasing human populations and their effects. The relative role of these factors is highly dependent on location, ecosystem type, and specific legacies of land uses. In this talk, I will review what has been learned in recent studies about climate-wildfire and forest insect outbreak dynamics, drawing upon the paleoecological record from tree-rings and sedimentary charcoal, and modern records of areas burned, drought and insect-caused tree mortality, and hydro-climatic observations. In considering "What can we do?", I will focus on a specific issue in forest restoration, namely,
the opportunity for landscape-scale treatments involving "fire use" (i.e., prescribed burning) in recent "wildfire mosaics".

Chris McGlone
Ecological Restoration Institute
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
928-523-7739