Brendan M Rogers

Brendan M Rogers
  • PhD
  • Professor (Associate) at Woodwell Climate Research Center

About

166
Publications
57,369
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
10,270
Citations
Introduction
I'm broadly interested in how terrestrial ecosystems are impacted by climate change in terms of their functioning, species compositions, and fluxes of energy, carbon, and water, and how these responses will feedback to the climate system. Much of my work has focused on disturbance regimes, particularly fire, as these are mechanisms by which ecosystems change abruptly. I use a combination of fieldwork, remote sensing, ecosystem models, and climate models.
Current institution
Woodwell Climate Research Center
Current position
  • Professor (Associate)
Additional affiliations
April 2014 - April 2016
Woodwell Climate Research Center
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2009 - March 2014
University of California, Irvine
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (166)
Article
Full-text available
Wildfires are common in boreal forests around the globe and strongly influence ecosystem processes. However, North American forests support more high-intensity crown fires than Eurasia, where lower-intensity surface fires are common. These two types of fire can result in different net effects on climate as a consequence of their contrasting impacts...
Article
Carbon emissions from boreal forest fires are projected to increase with continued warming and constitute a potentially significant positive feedback to climate change. The highest consistent combustion levels are reported in interior Alaska, and can be highly variable depending on the consumption of soil organic matter. Here we present an approach...
Article
Full-text available
Fires in the boreal forests of North America are generally stand-replacing, killing the majority of trees and initiating succession that may last over a century. Functional variation during succession can affect local surface energy budgets and, potentially, regional climate. Burn area across Alaska and Canada has increased in the last few decades...
Article
Full-text available
The diverse vegetation types and carbon pools of the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW) are tightly coupled to fire regimes that depend on climate and fire suppression. To realistically assess the effects of twenty‐first‐century climate change on PNW fire and carbon dynamics, we developed a new fire suppression rule for the MC1 dynamic general vegetation...
Preprint
Full-text available
Rapid warming across the Arctic is the primary driver of widespread permafrost thaw, with far-reaching consequences for local ecosystem resilience, the regional carbon budget, and the global climate system. Because permafrost characteristics and vulnerability are tightly linked to land cover, particularly vegetation type and surface properties, und...
Preprint
Full-text available
Retrogressive Thaw Slumps (RTS) in Arctic regions are distinct permafrost landforms with significant environmental impacts. Mapping these RTS is crucial because their appearance serves as a clear indication of permafrost thaw. However, their small scale compared to other landform features, vague boundaries, and spatiotemporal variation pose signifi...
Article
Full-text available
Fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from open water bodies are critical components of carbon‐climate feedbacks in high latitudes. Processes governing the spatial and temporal variability of these aquatic greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes are still highly uncertain due to limited observational data sets and lack of modeling studies incorporat...
Article
Full-text available
Fire regime refers to the statistical characteristics of fire events within specific spatio-temporal contexts, shaped by interactions among climatic conditions, vegetation types and natural or anthropogenic ignitions. Under the dual pressures of intensified global climate changes and human activities, fire regimes worldwide are undergoing unprecede...
Article
Full-text available
Arctic landscapes occupy a nexus of environmental change processes, globally significant soil carbon stores, wildlife populations, and subsistence-based human societies. In response to rapid climate warming, tundra ecosystems are experiencing widespread changes to vegetation and underlying permafrost, coupled with an array of ecological disturbance...
Article
Full-text available
Permafrost is undergoing rapid changes due to climate warming, potentially exposing a vast reservoir of carbon to be released to the atmosphere, causing a positive feedback cycle. Despite the importance of this feedback, its specifics remain poorly constrained, because representing permafrost dynamics still poses a significant challenge for Earth S...
Article
Full-text available
Deforestation and forest degradation are of continued and growing concern for biodiversity loss, carbon emissions, and a host of ecosystem services for local and global communities. Current remote sensing-based products of forest condition offer valuable information, but typically require extensive training data and represent snapshots in time. Her...
Article
Rapid warming in northern lands has led to increased ecosystem carbon uptake. It remains unclear, however, whether and how the beneficial effects of warming on carbon uptake will continue with climate change. Moreover, the role played by water stress in temperature control on ecosystem carbon uptake remains highly uncertain. Here, we systematically...
Article
Full-text available
The Arctic–Boreal Zone is rapidly warming, impacting its large soil carbon stocks. Here we use a new compilation of terrestrial ecosystem CO2 fluxes, geospatial datasets and random forest models to show that although the Arctic–Boreal Zone was overall an increasing terrestrial CO2 sink from 2001 to 2020 (mean ± standard deviation in net ecosystem e...
Article
Full-text available
The high latitudes cover ∼20% of Earth's land surface. This region is facing many shifts in thermal, moisture and vegetation properties, driven by climate warming. Here we leverage remote sensing and climate reanalysis records to improve understanding of changes in ecosystem indicators. We applied non‐parametric trend detections and Getis‐Ord Gi* s...
Article
Full-text available
Arctic permafrost is undergoing rapid changes due to climate warming in high latitudes. Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS) are one of the most abrupt and impactful thermal-denudation events that change Arctic landscapes and accelerate carbon feedbacks. Their spatial distribution remains poorly characterised due to time-intensive conventional mapping m...
Article
Full-text available
The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission distributes a product of CO $_{2}$ flux estimates (SPL4CMDL) derived from a terrestrial carbon flux model in which SMAP brightness temperatures are assimilated to update soil moisture (SM) and constrain the carbon cycle modeling. While the SPL4CMDL product has demonstrated promising performa...
Article
Full-text available
Retrogressive Thaw Slumps (RTS) in Arctic regions are distinct permafrost landforms with significant environmental impacts. Mapping these RTS is crucial because their appearance serves as a clear indication of permafrost thaw. However, their small scale compared to other landform features, vague boundaries, and spatiotemporal variation pose signifi...
Preprint
Full-text available
As the northern high latitude permafrost zone experiences accelerated warming, permafrost has become vulnerable to widespread thaw. Simultaneously, wildfire activity across northern boreal forest and Arctic/subarctic tundra regions impact permafrost stability through the combustion of insulating organic matter, vegetation and post-fire changes in a...
Article
Full-text available
Boreal fire regimes are intensifying because of climate change, and the northern parts of boreal forests are underlain by permafrost. Boreal fires combust vegetation and organic soils, which insulate permafrost, and as such deepen the seasonally thawed active layer and can lead to further carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Current understanding of...
Article
Full-text available
Forests around the world are under immense pressure from human land use and climate change. Old-growth and primary forests have been degraded in recent decades, yet are generally more resilient and resistant to climate change effects compared to human-modified forests. Nowhere is this more evident than in Russian Siberia, which contains almost one-...
Article
Increasing wildfire activity at northern high latitudes has the potential to mobilize large amounts of terrestrial mercury (Hg). However, understanding implications for Hg cycling and ecosystems is hindered by sparse research on peatland wildfire Hg emissions. In this study, we used measurements of soil organic carbon (SOC) and Hg, burn depth, and...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing wildfire occurrence and intensity have immediate effects on northern ecosystems due to combustion of aboveground vegetation and belowground soil organic matter. These immediate impacts have indirect and longer term effects, including deepening of the active layer, changes in soil decomposition rates, and shifts in plant community composi...
Article
Full-text available
Large stocks of soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in northern permafrost soils are vulnerable to remobilization under climate change. However, there are large uncertainties in present‐day greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets. We compare bottom‐up (data‐driven upscaling and process‐based models) and top‐down (atmospheric inversion models) budgets of carbon d...
Article
Full-text available
Ecosystems at high latitudes are changing rapidly in response to climate change. To understand changes in carbon fluxes across seasonal to multi‐decadal timescales, long‐term in situ measurements from eddy covariance networks are needed. However, there are large spatiotemporal gaps in the high‐latitude eddy covariance network. Here we used the rela...
Article
Full-text available
The world’s forests are being increasingly disturbed from exposure to the compounding impacts of land use and climate change, in addition to natural disturbance regimes. Boreal forests have a lower level of deforestation compared to tropical forests, and while they have higher levels of natural disturbances, the accumulated impact of forest managem...
Article
Full-text available
Arctic carbon emissions from thawing permafrost will accelerate the pace of global climate disruption and reduce the remaining headroom for direct human emissions before agreed global temperature targets are exceeded—the so-called “carbon budgets” for staying below, e.g., 1.5°C or 2.0°C above the pre-industrial global average surface temperature.1...
Preprint
Full-text available
The permafrost region contains a significant portion of the world's soil organic carbon, and its thawing, driven by accelerated Arctic warming, could lead to the substantial release of greenhouse gases, potentially disrupting the global climate system. Accurate predictions of carbon cycling in permafrost ecosystems hinge on the robust calibration o...
Article
Full-text available
Boreal and Arctic regions have warmed up to four times quicker than the rest of the planet since the 1970s. As a result, boreal and tundra ecosystems are experiencing more frequent and higher intensity extreme weather events and disturbances, such as wildfires. Yet limitations in ground and satellite data across the Arctic and boreal regions have c...
Article
Full-text available
Modeling Arctic-Boreal vegetation is a challenging but important task, since this highly dynamic ecosystem is undergoing rapid and substantial environmental change. In this work, we synthesized information on 18 dynamic vegetation models (DVMs) that can be used to project vegetation structure, composition, and function in North American Arctic-Bore...
Article
Full-text available
Tundra and boreal ecosystems encompass the northern circumpolar permafrost region and are experiencing rapid environmental change with important implications for the global carbon (C) budget. We analysed multi-decadal time series containing 302 annual estimates of carbon dioxide (CO2) flux across 70 permafrost and non-permafrost ecosystems, and 672...
Article
Full-text available
Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS) are a form of abrupt permafrost thaw that can rapidly mobilize ancient frozen soil carbon, magnifying the permafrost carbon feedback. However, the magnitude of this effect is uncertain, largely due to limited information about the distribution and extent of RTS across the circumpolar region. Although deep learning me...
Article
Full-text available
Accelerated warming of the Arctic can affect the global climate system by thawing permafrost and exposing organic carbon in soils to decompose and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We used a process-based biosphere model (DVM-DOS-TEM) designed to simulate biophysical and biogeochemical interactions between the soil, vegetation, and atmo...
Poster
Full-text available
Rising temperatures and drier conditions associated with climate change have intensified the occurrence of wildfires, presenting a growing risk to the integrity and function of boreal forests. To assess where and when reburning occurs and determine the consequences of reburning for post-fire successional trajectories we are synthesizing foundationa...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding vegetation recovery after fire is critical for predicting vegetation-mediated ecological dynamics in future climates. However, information characterizing vegetation recovery patterns after fire and their determinants over large geographical extents is limited. This study uses Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) leaf...
Article
Full-text available
The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here, we construct the first comprehensive bottom‐up budgets of CO2, CH4, and N2O across the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Wetlands are the largest natural source of methane (CH4) emissions globally. Northern wetlands (>45° N), accounting for 42 % of global wetland area, are increasingly vulnerable to carbon loss, especially as CH4 emissions may accelerate under intensified high-latitude warming. However, the magnitude and spatial patterns of high-latitude CH4 emission...
Article
Full-text available
The 2014 Northwest Territories fires are one of the largest wildfires in history. However, it is difficult to explain what caused such devastating wildfires simply with meteorological conditions and hydrological drought. There is a lack of large-scale Near-Real-Time (NRT) observations that characterize fuel conditions. To fill this research gap, we...
Preprint
Full-text available
Boreal fire regimes are intensifying because of climate change and the northern parts of boreal forests are underlain by permafrost. Boreal fires combust vegetation and organic soils, which insulate permafrost, and as such deepen the seasonally thawed active layer and can lead to further carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Current understanding of...
Article
Full-text available
Significant progress in permafrost carbon science made over the past decades include the identification of vast permafrost carbon stocks, the development of new pan‐Arctic permafrost maps, an increase in terrestrial measurement sites for CO2 and methane fluxes, and important factors affecting carbon cycling, including vegetation changes, periods of...
Article
Full-text available
This paper assesses trending AI foundation models, especially emerging computer vision foundation models and their performance in natural landscape feature segmentation. While the term foundation model has quickly garnered interest from the geospatial domain, its definition remains vague. Hence, this paper will first introduce AI foundation models...
Preprint
Full-text available
Rapid Arctic warming is thawing carbon-rich permafrost, releasing greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and accelerating global climate change. Despite the importance of this feedback, permafrost-enabled global-scale models simulate only one mechanism of belowground carbon loss: the gradual, top-down thickening of the seasonally-thawed soil layer. Th...
Article
Climate change is driving substantial changes in North American boreal forests, including changes in productivity, mortality, recruitment, and biomass. Despite the importance for carbon budgets and informing management decisions, there is a lack of near‐term (5–30 year) forecasts of expected changes in aboveground biomass (AGB). In this study, we f...
Article
Full-text available
The snow cover extent across the Northern Hemisphere has diminished, while the number of lightning ignitions and amount of burned area have increased over the last 5 decades with accelerated warming. However, the effects of earlier snow disappearance on fire are largely unknown. Here, we assessed the influence of snow disappearance timing on fire i...
Article
Full-text available
The changing thermal state of permafrost is an important indicator of climate change in northern high latitude ecosystems. The seasonally thawed soil active layer thickness (ALT) overlying permafrost may be deepening as a consequence of enhanced polar warming and widespread permafrost thaw in northern permafrost regions (NPR). The associated increa...
Article
Full-text available
Deciduous tree cover is expected to increase in North American boreal forests with climate warming and wildfire. This shift in composition has the potential to generate biophysical cooling via increased land surface albedo. Here we use Landsat-derived maps of continuous tree canopy cover and deciduous fractional composition to assess albedo change...
Preprint
Ecosystems at high latitudes are under increasing stress from climate change. To understand changes in carbon fluxes, in situ measurements from eddy covariance networks are needed. However, there are large spatiotemporal gaps in the high-latitude eddy covariance network. Here we used the relative extrapolation error index in machine learning-based...
Preprint
Ecosystems at high latitudes are under increasing stress from climate change. To understand changes in carbon fluxes, in situ measurements from eddy covariance networks are needed. However, there are large spatiotemporal gaps in the high-latitude eddy covariance network. Here we used the relative extrapolation error index in machine learning-based...
Preprint
The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here we construct the first comprehensive bottom-up budgets of CO2, CH4, and N2O across the t...
Preprint
The northern permafrost region has been projected to shift from a net sink to a net source of carbon under global warming. However, estimates of the contemporary net greenhouse gas (GHG) balance and budgets of the permafrost region remain highly uncertain. Here we construct the first comprehensive bottom-up budgets of CO, CH, and NO across the terr...
Preprint
The long-term net sink of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the northern permafrost region is projected to weaken or shift under climate change. But large uncertainties remain, even on present-day GHG budgets. We compare bottom-up (data-driven upscaling, process-based models) and top-down budgets (atmospheric inversion models)...
Preprint
Full-text available
The snow cover extent across the Northern Hemisphere has diminished while fire extent and severity has increased over the last five decades with accelerated warming. However, the effects of earlier snowmelt on fire is largely unknown. Here, we assessed the influence of snowmelt timing on fire ignitions across 16 ecoregions of boreal North America....
Article
Full-text available
Fire is the dominant disturbance agent in Alaskan and Canadian boreal ecosystems and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Burned area and carbon emissions have been increasing with climate change, which have the potential to alter the carbon balance and shift the region from a historic sink to a source. It is therefore critically i...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding vegetation recovery after fire is critical for predicting vegetation-mediated ecological dynamics in future climates. However, information characterizing vegetation recovery patterns after fire and their determinants are lacking over large geographical extents. This study uses Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) leaf...
Article
Full-text available
Tundra environments are experiencing elevated levels of wildfire, and the frequency is expected to keep increasing due to rapid climate change in the Arctic. Tundra wildfires can release globally significant amounts of greenhouse gasses that influence the Earth's radiative balance. Here we develop a novel method for estimating carbon loss and the r...
Article
Full-text available
Small water bodies (i.e., ponds; <0.01 km²) play an important role in Earth System processes, including carbon cycling and emissions of methane. Detection and monitoring of ponds using satellite imagery has been extremely difficult and many water maps are biased toward lakes (>0.01 km²). We leverage high‐resolution (3 m) optical satellite imagery f...
Article
Full-text available
Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS) are thermokarst features in ice-rich hillslope permafrost terrain, and their occurrence in the warming Arctic is increasingly frequent and has caused dynamic changes to the landscape. RTS can significantly impact permafrost stability and generate substantial carbon emissions. Understanding the spatial and temporal di...
Article
Arctic-boreal landscapes are experiencing profound warming, along with changes in ecosystem moisture status and disturbance from fire. This region is of global importance in terms of carbon feedbacks to climate, yet the sign (sink or source) and magnitude of the Arctic-boreal carbon budget within recent years remains highly uncertain. Here, we prov...
Article
Full-text available
In fire emission models, the spatial resolution of both the modelling framework and the satellite data used to quantify burned area can have considerable impact on emission estimates. Consideration of this sensitivity is especially important in areas with heterogeneous land cover and fire regimes and when constraining model output with field measur...
Article
Full-text available
Since the shale Oil/Gas revolution, gas flaring and venting in the United States has garnered increasing attention. There is a pressing need to understand the spatial–temporal characteristics of gas flaring and track the associated greenhouse gas emissions. In this context, we use a thermal anomaly index (TAI) incorporating the Google Earth Engine...
Article
Full-text available
Several key international policy frameworks involve forests, including the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). However, rules and guidelines that treat forest types equally regardless of their ecosystem integrity and risk profiles in terms of forest and carbon loss limit policy effectiveness and can f...
Article
Full-text available
Ecosystems in the North American Arctic-Boreal Zone (ABZ) experience a diverse set of disturbances associated with wildfire, permafrost dynamics, geomorphic processes, insect outbreaks and pathogens, extreme weather events, and human activity. Climate warming in the ABZ is occurring at over twice the rate of the global average, and as a result the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Fire is the dominant disturbance agent in Alaskan and Canadian boreal ecosystems and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Burned area and carbon emissions have been increasing with climate change, which have the potential to alter the carbon balance and shift the region from a historic sink to a source. It is therefore critically i...
Article
Full-text available
Warming of northern high latitude regions (NHL, > 50 °N) has increased both photosynthesis and respiration which results in considerable uncertainty regarding the net carbon dioxide (CO2) balance of NHL ecosystems. Using estimates constrained from atmospheric observations from 1980 to 2017, we find that the increasing trends of net CO2 uptake in th...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is intensifying fire regimes across boreal regions, and thus both burned area and carbon emissions from combustion are expected to increase significantly over the next several decades. Fire management through initial suppression of fires is effective at reducing burned area, but limited work has addressed the role that fire managemen...
Article
Full-text available
Permafrost thaw is drastically altering Arctic lands and creating hazardous conditions for its residents, who are being forced to make difficult and urgent decisions about where and how to live to protect themselves and their lifeways from the impacts of climate change. Permafrost thaw also poses a risk to global climate due to the large pool of or...
Article
Full-text available
Mature and old-growth forests (MOG) of the conterminous United States collectively support exceptional levels of biodiversity but have declined substantially from logging and development. National-scale proposals to protect 30 and 50% of all lands and waters are useful in assessing MOG conservation targets given the precarious status of these fores...
Article
Full-text available
Deforestation and forest degradation from human land use, including primary forest loss, are of growing concern. The conservation of old-growth and other forests with important environmental values is central to many international initiatives aimed at protecting biodiversity, mitigating climate change impacts, and supporting sustainable livelihoods...
Preprint
Full-text available
Tundra environments are experiencing elevated levels of wildfire, and the frequency is expected to keep increasing due to accelerating climate change in the Arctic. Tundra wildfires can release globally significant amounts of greenhouse gasses that influence the Earth’s radiative balance. Here we develop a novel method for estimating carbon loss an...
Article
This study examines the post-fire biogeophysical and biochemical dynamics after several high-severity wildfires that occurred in mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forest types in the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains regions between 1986 and 2017. We found a consistent pattern of reduced leaf area index (LAI) in the first year after fire, followed...
Article
Full-text available
Climatic warming has greatly increased vegetation productivity in the extratropical Northern Hemisphere since the 1980s, but how long this positive relationship will continue remains unknown. Here we show changes in the effect of warming on Northern Hemisphere summer gross primary productivity for 2001–2100 using Earth system model outputs. The cor...
Article
Fires across the Arctic-boreal zone (ABZ) play an important role in the boreal forest succession, permafrost thaw, and the regional and global carbon cycle and climate. These fires occur mainly in summer with large interannual variability. Previous studies primarily focused on the impacts of local surface climate and tropical El Niño-Southern Oscil...
Preprint
Full-text available
In fire emission models, the spatial resolution of both the modelling framework and the satellite data used to quantify burned area can have considerable impact on emission estimates. Consideration of this sensitivity is especially important in areas with heterogeneous land cover and fire regimes, and when constraining model output with field measu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Context Information on the maturity of forests is important for conservation planning. However, available information for the USA is inadequate to support national conservation assessment and planning. Objectives The main objective was to spatially model at a high resolution the relative level of maturity and stand development for forests across co...
Article
Full-text available
Wildfires in boreal forests release large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change. Here, we characterize the magnitude of recent and projected gross and net boreal North American wildfire carbon dioxide emissions, evaluate fire management as an emissions reduction strategy, and quantify the associated costs. Ou...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change has driven an increase in the frequency and severity of fires in Eurasian boreal forests. A growing number of field studies have linked the change in fire regime to post-fire recruitment failure and permanent forest loss. In this study we used four burned area and two forest loss datasets to calculate the landscape-scale fire return...
Article
Full-text available
Forest characteristics, structure, and dynamics within the North American boreal region are heavily influenced by wildfire intensity, severity, and frequency. Increasing temperatures are likely to result in drier conditions and longer fire seasons, potentially leading to more intense and frequent fires. However, an increase in deciduous forest cove...
Article
Full-text available
The northern permafrost region holds almost half of the world's soil carbon in just 15% of global terrestrial surface area. Between 2007 and 2016, permafrost warmed by an average of 0.29°C, with observations indicating that frozen ground in the more southerly, discontinuous permafrost zone is already thawing. Despite this, our understanding of pote...
Article
Full-text available
Past efforts to synthesize and quantify the magnitude and change in carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems across the rapidly warming Arctic–boreal zone (ABZ) have provided valuable information but were limited in their geographical and temporal coverage. Furthermore, these efforts have been based on data aggregated over varying time...
Preprint
Full-text available
Deciduous tree cover is expected to increase in North American boreal forests with climate warming and wildfire occurrence. This shift in composition can generate biophysical cooling effects via increased land surface albedo. Here we use newly derived maps of continuous tree canopy and fractional deciduous cover to assess change over recent decades...
Poster
Abstract In recent decades, climate warming has led to elevated fire activity in boreal forests with increases in severity and extent. This intensification of fire regimes may shift the boreal region from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source. Quantifying and understanding of the drivers of carbon combustion are essential to accurately estimatin...
Preprint
Climate change has driven an increase in the frequency and severity of fires in Eurasian boreal forests. A growing number of field studies have linked the change in fire regime to post-fire recruitment failure and permanent forest loss. In this study we used four burnt area and two forest loss datasets to calculate the landscape-scale fire return i...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Black spruce is the dominant tree species in boreal North America and has shaped forest flammability, carbon storage, and other landscape processes over the last several thousand years. However, climate warming and increases in wildfire activity may be undermining its ability to maintain dominance, shifting forests toward alternative f...
Article
Full-text available
Forest disturbances are a critical environmental issue globally and within the boreal biome, yet detailed attribution and trends in disturbances are lacking for many Siberian regions. The Angara region located in the southern taiga of Central Siberia has experienced significant disturbances during the past several decades and is a hotspot of change...
Article
Full-text available
Wildfire frequency and extent is increasing throughout the boreal forest-tundra ecotone as climate warms. Understanding the impacts of wildfire throughout this ecotone is required to make predictions of the rate and magnitude of changes in boreal-tundra landcover, its future flammability, and associated feedbacks to the global carbon (C) cycle and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Past efforts to synthesize and quantify the magnitude and change in carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems across the rapidly warming Arctic-Boreal Zone (ABZ) have provided valuable information, but were limited in their geographical and temporal coverage. Furthermore, these efforts have been based on data aggregated over varying tim...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change-driven droughts and insect outbreaks are becoming more frequent and widespread, increasing forest vulnerability to mortality. By addressing the impacts of climate and insects on tree growth preceding death, we can better understand tree mortality risk under a changing climate. Here, we used tree stature and interannual growth (basal...
Article
Full-text available
Fire severity is a key fire regime characteristic with high ecological and carbon cycle relevance. Prior studies on boreal forest fires primarily focused on mapping severity in North American boreal forests. However, the dominant tree species and their impacts on fire regimes are different between North American and Siberian boreal forests. Here, w...
Article
Full-text available
The increase in wildfire occurrence and severity seen over the past decades in the boreal and Arctic biomes is expected to continue in the future in response to rapid climate change in this region. Recent studies documented positive trends in gross primary productivity (GPP) for Arctic boreal biomes driven by warming, but it is unclear how GPP tren...
Article
Full-text available
The Arctic–boreal zone (ABZ) is experiencing amplified warming, actively changing biogeochemical cycling of vegetation and soils. The land-to-atmosphere fluxes of CO2 in the ABZ have the potential to increase in magnitude and feedback to the climate causing additional large-scale warming. The ability to model and predict this vulnerability is criti...

Network

Cited By