Glen M. MacDonald

• Ph.D.
• Chair at University of California, Los Angeles

Juniperus spp. are keystone shrubs in western North America and important climatic indicators in paleo‐records. However, a lack of taxonomic resolution among fossil species limits our ability to track past environmental changes. Plant macrofossils at Rancho La Brea (RLB) allow for reconstructions of juniper occurrence to species across 60 000 yr. W...

Climate change is an existential threat to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of the coastal zone and impacts will be complex and widespread. Evidence from California and across the United States shows that climate change is impacting coastal communities and challenging managers with a plethora of stressors already present. Widespre...

Sea-level rise is particularly concerning for tidal wetlands that reside within an area with steep topography or are constrained by human development and alteration of sedimentation. Sediment augmentation to increase wetland elevations has been considered as a potential strategy for such areas to prevent wetland loss over the coming decades. Howeve...

We report on the distribution of contemporary foraminifera in salt marshes in Mission Bay and Carpinteria Slough, Southern California. Combining these data with existing datasets from Seal Beach and Tijuana, we explore the potential for a regional training set to underpin quantitative reconstructions of paleoenvironmental change from foraminifera p...

Free Access to the Final Version: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gk477sfVZAEgd (Available before 30, April, 2023) Urban vegetation is valuable in alleviating local heatwaves. However, drought may decrease vegetation health and limit this cooling effect. Here we use the satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Palmer Droug...

Southern California is a biodiversity hotspot and home to over 23 million people. Over recent decades the annual wildfire area in the coastal southern California region has not significantly changed. Yet how fire regime will respond to future anthropogenic climate change remains an important question. Here, we estimate wildfire probability in south...

We compiled pollen sequences from lake and offshore cores at least 6,000 years old (6 ka) for the Mediterranean and Marine ecoregions of the US West Coast. Principal Component Analysis highlighted vegetation differences in core-tops, the Holocene Thermal Maximum (6 ka) and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 19 ka). Core-top and HTM ordination produced clus...

Coastal wetlands have two dimensions of vulnerability to sea‐level rise (SLR), a vertical one, in cases where SLR outpaces their capacity to vertically accrete, and a lateral one, in cases where they are restricted from migrating inland by topography and land use. We conducted a meta‐analysis of accretion rates, standardized our analysis by using o...

The San Francisco Bay has the largest concentration of salt marshes in the state of California. In the last 170 years, the vast majority of the historic tidal wetlands in the Bay have been significantly altered or destroyed due to diking, filling and other processes. Many of the remaining marshes have been impacted by changing sedimentation regimes...

The rise and decline of many complex, pre-European maize-farming cultures in the American Southwest coincides with the warm, climatically quiescent Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 850-1350 CE) and transition to the cool, hydrologically variable Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1350-1850 CE). The effects of drought on early subsistence agriculture in the...

Significance Over many millennia, northern peatlands have accumulated large amounts of carbon and nitrogen, thus cooling the global climate. Over shorter timescales, peatland disturbances can trigger losses of peat and release of greenhouses gases. Despite their importance to the global climate, peatlands remain poorly mapped, and the vulnerability...

A multiproxy record from Baldwin Lake, San Bernardino Mountains, allowed us to examine variation and relationships between erosion, wildfire, vegetation, and climate in subalpine Southern California from 120 to 15 ka. Bulk organics, biogenic silica, and molar C:N data were generally antiphased with magnetic and trace element data and displayed long...

A combination of drought and high temperatures ("global-change-type drought") is projected to become increasingly common in Mediterranean climate regions. Recently, Southern California has experienced record-breaking high temperatures coupled with significant precipitation deficits, which provides opportunities to investigate the impacts of high te...

This paper presents the first record of fire in Pacific coast salt marshes; the 1993 Green Meadows Fire and the 2013 Camarillo Springs Fire burned an area of Salicornia-dominated salt marsh at Point Mugu, CA. These fires inspire concern about resiliency of ecosystems not adapted to fire, already threatened by sea-level rise (SLR), and under stress...

Plain Language Summary In this study, we investigated California vegetation responses to the recent prolonged 2012–2016 drought, which was potentially the driest 4‐year span in the last 1,200 years. The overall vegetation of the state has been presumed to be severely affected. However, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) satellite data re...

The climate regime shift during the 1980s had a substantial impact on the terrestrial ecosystems and vegetation at different scales. However, the mechanisms driving vegetation changes, before and after the shift, remain unclear. In this study, we used a biophysical dynamic vegetation model to estimate large-scale trends in terms of carbon fixation,...

The River Nile catchment is considered the major source of nutrient-rich freshwater and sediment draining into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Thus, exceptional high-resolution record from the Nile Littoral Cell likely traces changes in the Nile outflows related to climatic changes driven by the monsoonal system. This study used multi-proxy analyses...

California's climate has become warmer since the early 20th century and is experiencing marked aridity in this century. Satellite-based climate and vegetation data, along with surface-based data, were used to investigate the changing hydroclimate and its impacts on both wildland and urban vegetation. Drying has been more evident in southern Califor...

Salt marsh-dependent species are vulnerable to impacts of sea-level rise (SLR). Site-specific differences in ecogeomorphic processes result in different SLR vulnerabilities. SLR impacts to Ridgway’s rail (Rallus obsoletus) of Southern California (SC) and San Francisco Bay (SF), U.S.A. could foreshadow SLR effects on other coastal endemic species. S...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

The carbon sink potential of peatlands depends on the balance between carbon uptake by plants and microbial decomposition. The rates of both these processes will increase with warming but it remains unclear which will dominate the global peatland response. Here we examine the global relationship between peatland carbon accumulation rates during the...

The Fremont were members of an expansive maize-based Ancestral Puebloan (AP) cultural complex who disappeared from Utah between the 12th and 13th centuries CE. This period brackets that of a climatic transition in the Southwest from the warm, dry Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 850–1350 CE) to the cool, hydro-climatically variable Little Ice Age...

Sea‐level rise (SLR) impacts on intertidal habitat depend on coastal topology, accretion, and constraints from surrounding development. Such habitat changes might affect species like Belding's savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis beldingi; BSSP), which live in high‐elevation salt marsh in the Southern California Bight. To predict how BSSP h...

Tidal wetlands produce long-term soil organic carbon (C) stocks. Thus for carbon accounting purposes, we need accurate and precise information on the magnitude and spatial distribution of those stocks. We assembled and analyzed an unprecedented soil core dataset, and tested three strategies for mapping carbon stocks: applying the average value from...

The climate regime shift during the 1980s had a substantial impact on the terrestrial ecosystems and vegetation at different scales. However, the mechanisms driving vegetation changes, before and after the shift, remain unclear. In this study, we used a biophysical-dynamic vegetation model to estimate large-scale trends in terms of carbon fixation,...

Ecosystems in Mediterranean climates are adapted to seasonal drought. Multi‐annual drought, however, may significantly affect Mediterranean ecosystems and, further, may affect their constituent communities in different ways with differences in responses emerging during severe drought and over the course of long‐term climate change. This study inves...

It is generally concluded that the climate in California has become drier during the past two decades. However, there is evidence of a distinct north-south pattern of hydroclimatic variability due to a climatic dipole in the western United States. In this study, analysis of MODIS-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and a newly con...

We used a first-of-its-kind comprehensive scenario approach to evaluate both the vertical and horizontal response of tidal wetlands to projected changes in the rate of sea-level rise (SLR) across 14 estuaries along the Pacific coast of the continental United States. Throughout the U.S. Pacific region, we found that tidal wetlands are highly vulnera...

California’s Mediterranean ecosystem has been identified as one of the Earth’s biodiversity hotspots. The high degree of rapid urbanization along the southern California coastline has resulted in the loss of significant natural areas over the last century and protected areas that do exist may be further threatened by climate change, drought, and fi...

Light pollution has been of increasing concern as it relates to protected areas. As such, natural resource managers need information on the distribution, intensity, and dynamics of nighttime lights in protected areas. We examine the extent of nighttime light brightness from 1992 to 2012 in the Mediterranean Coast Network (Santa Monica Mountains Nat...

Paleoenvironmental records from a southern California coastal saltmarsh reveal evidence for repeated late Holocene coseismic subsidence events. Field analysis of sediment gouge cores established discrete lithostratigraphic units extend across the wetland. Detailed sediment analyses reveal abrupt changes in lithology, percent total organic matter, g...

Salt marsh resilience to sea-level rise depends on marsh plain elevation, tidal range, subsurface processes, as well as surface accretion, of which suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) is a critical component. However, spatial and temporal patterns of inorganic sedimentation are poorly quantified within and across Salicornia pacifica (pickleweed)...

Salt-marsh foraminifera are frequently used around the world as proxies in paleoenvironmental studies of sea-level change. Quantitative reconstructions of sea-level change use transfer functions which are based on the vertical zonation of salt-marsh foraminifera with respect to the tidal frame. This paper explores for the first time the environment...

California has experienced a dry 21(st) century capped by severe drought from 2012 through 2015 prompting questions about hydroclimatic sensitivity to anthropogenic climate change and implications for the future. We address these questions using a Holocene lake sediment record of hydrologic change from the Sierra Nevada Mountains coupled with marin...

The impacts of light pollution and its fluctuations at landscape scales are a concern of public land managers. More information on the distribution, intensity, and dynamics of light pollution in national parks will help improve management decisions. We examined the nature and extent of nighttime light on National Park Service protected areas using...

Salt-marsh foraminifera are proxies frequently used around the world in paleoenvironmental studies of sea-level change. Quantitative reconstructions of sea-level change use transfer functions which are based on the vertical zonation of salt-marsh foraminifera with respect to the tidal frame. This paper explores for the first time the environmental...

Salt marsh elevation and geomorphic stability depends on mineral sedimentation. Many Mediterranean-climate salt marshes along southern California, USA coast import sediment during El Niño storm events, but sediment fluxes and mechanisms during dry weather are potentially important for marsh stability. We calculated tidal creek sediment fluxes withi...

The Boreal Shield and James Bay Lowland regions of Ontario have few Holocene reconstructions specific to surface moisture despite their potential importance to documenting the geographic patterns and teleconnections of Holocene pluvials and droughts, as well as their role in the global carbon cycle. We reconstructed water table depth using preserve...

A 2700-year-old peat core from the southern West Siberian Lowlands was used to reconstruct past water-table depth using testate amoeba analysis and to compare hydrological changes with temperature variations associated with the Medieval Climate Anomaly, ‘Little Ice Age’, and 20th-century warming. The robustness of water-table results was assessed u...

Many studies use radiocarbon dates on estuarine shell material to build age-depth models of sediment accu¬mulation in estuaries in California, USA. Marine 14C ages are typically older than dates from contemporaneous terrestrial carbon and local offsets (ΔR) from the global average marine offset need to be calculated to ensure the accuracy of calibr...

The biochemical composition of a peat core from James Bay Lowland, Canada, was used to assess the extent of peat decomposition and diagenetic alteration. Our goal was to identify environmental controls on peat decomposition, particularly its sensitivity to naturally occurring changes in temperature, oxygen exposure time, and vegetation. All three v...

In this policy perspective, we outline several conditions to support effective science-policy interaction, with a particular emphasis on improving water governance in transboundary basins. Key conditions include (1) recognizing that science is a crucial but bounded input into water resource decision-making processes; (2) establishing conditions for...

Recent studies have shown that current dynamic vegetation models have serious weaknesses in reproducing the observed vegetation dynamics and contribute to bias in climate simulations. This study intends to identify the major factors that underlie the connections between vegetation dynamics and climate variability and investigates vegetation spatial...

Peatlands in northern Ontario, Canada, archive multiple biological indicators, including macrofossils, algae, testate amoebae, and pollen. These proxies can provide insights concerning the timing and nature of long-term climatic and environmental changes. The Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL) of central Canada contain one of Earth’s largest continuous peat...

Diatoms collected from 113 surface peat samples from the Boreal Shield and Hudson Plains show taxonomic distributions that are associated with macro-vegetation type, pH, and position relative to the water table, the main environmental variables measured in this study. The overall goal of our research was to determine the ecological distribution and...

A sediment core representing the past two millennia was recovered from Stella Lake in the Snake Range of the central Great Basin in Nevada. The core was analyzed for sub-fossil chironomids and sediment organic content. A quantitative reconstruction of mean July air temperature (MJAT) was developed using a regional training set and a chironomid-base...

A century after John Muir’s death, Glen MacDonald examines his legacy and argues that while Muir’s message of the value of wilderness to society might need to evolve for a twenty-first century audience, it is still relevant. For instance, Muir believed in the transformative power of visiting remote wildernesses such as Yosemite and urged everyone t...

Despite their importance as globally significant carbon (C) stores, basic knowledge of post-glacial peatland history and C accumulation are lacking for the Canadian Boreal Shield and James Bay Lowland (JBL) of central and northern Ontario, Canada. Radiocarbon dates, plant macrofossil analysis, and soil C estimates from an eight-core transect of the...

Here, we present results from the most comprehensive compilation of Holocene peat soil properties with associated carbon and nitrogen accumulation rates for northern peatlands. Our database consists of 268 peat cores from 215 sites located north of 45 degrees N. It encompasses regions within which peat carbon data have only recently become availabl...

Terrestrial ecosystems in the northern high-latitudes are currently experiencing drastic warming and recent studies suggest that boreal forests may be increasingly vulnerable to warming-related factors, including temperature-induced drought stress as well as shifts in fire regimes and insect outbreaks. Here, we analyze interannual relationships in...

Peatlands surrounding Hudson and James Bays form the second largest peatland complex in the world and contain major stores of soil carbon (C). This study utilized a transect of eight ombrotrophic peat cores from remote regions of central and northern Ontario to quantify the magnitude and rate of C accumulation since peatland initiation and for the...

Glen M. MacDonald dispels the myth that Los Angeles is a desert city. But he also warns that a desert is what Los Angeles may one day become. After defining what a desert is and then proving that Los Angeles (for now) is not a desert, Macdonald investigates the origins of the “desert city” myth. This myth has thrived despite the evidence that MacDo...

[1] The major increase in atmospheric methane (CH4) concentration during the last glacial-interglacial transition provides a useful example for understanding the interactions and feedbacks among Earth's climate, biosphere carbon cycling, and atmospheric chemistry. However, the causes of CH4 doubling during the last deglaciation are still uncertain...

Existing relations among land cover, species distributions, ecosystem processes (such as the flow of water and decomposition of organic matter), and human land use are the basis for projecting ranges of ecological responses to different scenarios of climate change.However, because such relations evolve, projections based on current relations are li...

The Southwest’s high species richness of diverse groups of plants and animals (Kier et al. 2009) in part reflects the considerable geographic and seasonal variation in climate within the region (see Figure 4.1). For example, the difference in absolute minimum and maximum temperatures at a given location within a year can be as much as 113 F (45 C)...

Natural climate variability is a prominent factor that affects many aspects of life, livelihoods, landscapes, and decision-making across the Southwestern U.S. (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah; included are the adjacent United States-Mexico border and Southwest Native Nations land). These natural fluctuations have caused...

Although the Arctic occupies less than 5% of the Earth's surface, it includes some of the strongest positive feedbacks in the climate system. Reconstructing the climate history of the Quaternary requires a suite of climate proxies that can be placed in a secure time frame. Most Arctic proxies reflect past summer temperatures, although a subset is s...

Peatlands are a major terrestrial carbon store and a persistent natural carbon sink during the Holocene, but there is considerable uncertainty over the fate of peatland carbon in a changing climate. It is generally assumed that higher temperatures will increase peat decay, causing a positive feedback to climate warming and contributing to the globa...

Peatlands are a major terrestrial carbon store and a persistent natural carbon sink during the Holocene, but there is considerable uncertainty over the fate of peatland carbon in a changing climate. It is generally assumed that higher temperatures will increase peat decay, causing a positive feedback to climate warming and contributing to the globa...

High-resolution palynological, charcoal, and sedimentological analysis of a sediment core from Keālia Pond, Maui, coupled with archaeological and historical records, provides a detailed chronology of vegetation and climate change since before human arrival. These records provide new evidence for human–environment linkages during the Hawaiian Polyne...

Extinction of the woolly mammoth in Beringia has long been subject to research and speculation. Here we use a new geo-referenced database of radiocarbon-dated evidence to show that mammoths were abundant in the open-habitat of Marine Isotope Stage 3 (∼45-30 ka). During the Last Glacial Maximum (∼25-20 ka), northern populations declined while those...

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Russia's West Siberian Lowland (WSL) contains the most extensive peatlands on Earth with many underlain by permafrost. We present a new database of 12 705 measurements of vertical water content and bulk soil properties from 98 permafrost and non-permafrost cores collected in raised bogs and peat plateaus across the region, together with in-situ mea...

IntroductionThe Central Canadian Treeline Zone TodayCurrent Warming at the Central Canadian TreelineResponse of the Central Canadian Treeline to Warming TemperaturesReferencesDiscussion QuestionsSome Useful Internet Sources

AGU Chapman Conference on Advances in Lagrangian Modeling of the Atmosphere; Grindelwald, Switzerland, 10–14 October 2011 Under the majestic gaze of the Eiger north face in Switzerland, an international group of researchers met as part of a Chapman Conference to discuss advances in Lagrangian modeling of the atmosphere. Lagrangian models track the...

The Western Siberian Lowland is among the largest wetlands in the world, and it is estimated to store ~70 Pg C as peat. Based on radiocarbon dating, peat accumulation rates at sites south of 60°N are higher than those at more northerly sites during the past 2000 yr. The biochemical composition of peat from high-resolution sampling in four cores was...

Research focusing on the effects of radiative forcing and associated feedback mechanisms to the contemporaneous Arctic environment has highlighted the need to improve our knowledge of past climate variations and their impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Recent work has documented the response of the Arctic to low frequency climate change...

This review focuses on biotic responses during intervals of time in the fossil record when the magnitude and rate of climate change exceeded or were comparable with those predicted to occur in the next century (Solomon et al. 2007). These include biotic responses during: (a) the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum and early Eocene Climatic Optimum, (b) th...