Climate change and elevated atmospheric CO 2 levels could increase the vulnerability of plants to freezing. We analyzed tissue damage resulting from naturally occurring freezing events in plants from a longterm in situ CO 2 enrichment (+ 200 ppm, 2001-2009) and soil warming (+ 4°C since 2007) experiment at treeline in the Swiss Alps (Stillberg, Davos).

We analyzed wildfire exposure for key social and ecological features on the national forests in Oregon and Washington. The forests contain numerous urban interfaces, old growth forests, recreational sites, and habitat for rare and endangered species. Many of these resources are threatened by wildfire, especially in the east Cascade Mountains fire-prone forests.

Semiarid ecosystems of Western North America are experiencing a boom in natural gas development. However, these systems are slow to recover from the disturbances created. The purpose of this study was to develop improved restoration techniques on natural gas well pads in Western Colorado.

Restoration practices incorporating timber harvest (e.g. to remove undesirable species or reduce tree densities) may generate unmerchantable wood debris that is piled and burned for fuel reduction. Slash pile burns are common in longleaf pine ecosystem restoration that involves hardwood removal before reintroduction of frequent prescribed fire.

Wildfires change plant communities by reducing dominance of some species while enhancing the abundance of others. Detailed habitat-specific models have been developed to predict plant responses to fire, but these models generally ignore the breadth of fire regime characteristics that can influence plant survival such as the degree and duration of exposure to lethal temperatures.

Aim Wildfire is often considered more severe now than historically in dry forests of the western United States. Tree-ring reconstructions, which suggest that historical dry forests were park-like with large, old trees maintained by low-severity fires,are from small, scattered studies.

Rising sea levels threaten the sustainability of coastal wetlands around the globe, thus understanding how increased inundation alters the elevation change mechanisms in these systems is increasingly important.

Projected effects of climate change on animal distributions primarily focus on consequences of temperature and largely ignore impacts of altered precipitation. While much evidence supports temperature-driven range shifts, there is substantial heterogeneity in species' responses that remains poorly understood.

We provide a case study prioritizing instream flow restoration activities by sub-basin according to the habitat needs of Endangered Species Act (ESA)-listed salmonids relative to climate change in the central Columbia River basin in Washington State (USA). The objective is to employ scenario analysis to inform and improve existing instream flow restoration projects.

Dynamic global vegetation models simulate feedbacks of vegetation change on ecosystem processes, but direct, experimental evidence for feedbacks that result from atmospheric CO 2 enrichment is rare. We hypothesized that feedbacks from species change would amplify the initial CO 2 stimulation of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) of tallgrass prairie communities.