Jordan Muss

Los Alamos National Laboratory | LANL · Associate Directorate for Experimental Physical Sciences

Whether the presence of permafrost systematically alters the rate of riverbank erosion is a fundamental geomorphic question with significant importance to infrastructure, water quality, and biogeochemistry of high latitude watersheds. For over four decades this question has remained unanswered due to a lack of data. Using remotely sensed imagery, w...

Widespread tree mortality associated with drought has been observed on all forested continents and global change is expected to exacerbate vegetation vulnerability. Forest mortality has implications for future biosphere-atmosphere interactions of carbon, water and energy balance, and is poorly represented in dynamic vegetation models. Reducing unce...

Widespread tree mortality associated with drought has been observed on all forested continents and global change is expected to exacerbate vegetation vulnerability. Forest mortality has implications for future biosphere–atmosphere interactions of carbon, water and energy balance, and is poorly represented in dynamic vegetation models. Reducing unce...

Remotely sensed imagery of rivers has long served as a means for characterizing channel properties and detection of planview change. In the last decade the dramatic increase in the availability of satellite imagery and processing tools has created the potential to greatly expand the spatial and temporal scale of our understanding of river morpholog...

Global temperature rise and extremes accompanying drought threaten forests1,2 and their associated climatic feedbacks3,4. Our ability to accurately simulate drought-induced forest impacts remains highly uncertain5,6 in part owing to our failure to integrate physiological measurements, regionalscale models, and dynamic global vegetation models(DGVMs...

Although plant photosynthetic capacity as determined by the maximum carboxylation rate (i.e., Vc, max25) and the maximum electron transport rate (i.e., Jmax25) at a reference temperature (generally 25 °C) is known to vary substantially in space and time in response to environmental conditions, it is typically parameterized in Earth system models (E...

Terrestrial disturbances may be accelerating globally, but their impacts go un-quantified due to the lack of a comprehensive monitoring system. Remote sensing offers enormous potential for global disturbance observation. Here we review the state of remote sensing in disturbance ecology, and develop a framework for a global disturbance monitoring sy...

Fundamental drivers of ecosystem processes such as temperature and precipitation are rapidly changing and creating novel environmental conditions. Forest landscape models (FLM) are used by managers and policy-makers to make projections of future ecosystem dynamics under alternative management or policy options, but the links between the fundamental...

Models that use large-footprint waveform light detection and ranging (lidar) to estimate forest height, structure, and biomass have typically used either point data extracted from the waveforms or cumulative distributions of the waveform energy, disregarding potential information latent within the waveform shape. Shape-based metrics such as the cen...

In the past three decades, two types of lidar systems, discrete and waveform, have been used to estimate forest structure, including height, biomass, and basal area. While there are many similarities between these two systems, their fundamental differences are the manner in which the laser backscatter is recorded and, to a lesser degree, how these...

The use of airborne laser scanning systems (lidar) to describe forest structure has increased dramatically since height profiling experiments nearly 30 years ago. The analyses in most studies employ a suite of frequency-based metrics calculated from the lidar height data, which are systematically eliminated from a full model using stepwise multiple...

In a recent article, McMahon et al. (1) examined forest-plot biomass accumulation across a range of stands in the mid-Atlantic United States and suggest that climate change and trends in atmospheric CO2 explain an increase in forest growth. To show this increase, they fit a simple model to live above-ground forest biomass (AGB) as a function of sta...

Measurements under varying degrees of canopy closure show that the snowpack beneath a forest canopy can have 33% to 80% less snow than the snowpack in an opening. Much of the broad variation in the snow water equivalent (SWE) of the snowpack gradient measured under different forest stands can be attributed to stand-specific canopy structure. Differ...

Background/Question/Methods Measurements of the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of forest canopies are important because they can convey information about how the canopy intercepts material (e.g., precipitation or light) and how habitat is structured within it. The most common methods are based on plant area index (the total plant area per unit...

Aim We present a model to account for self-assembly of the slough–ridge–tree island patterned landscape of the central Everglades in southern Florida via feedbacks among landforms, hydrology, vegetation and biogeochemistry. We test aspects of this model by analysing vegetation composition in relation to local and landscape-level drivers. Location W...

Lygodium microphyllum (Cav.) R. Br. (Lygodiaceae) is a climbing fern that is becoming one of the worst non-indigenous invasive plant species in the greater Everglades ecosystem of southern Florida, USA. We examined the fern across a range of scales including the seasonality of its spore production, its height growth within infested sites and its co...

A new survey of the Big Cypress National Preserve shows that the vascular flora consists of 145 families and 851 species. Of these, 72 are listed by the State of Florida as endangered or threatened plants, while many others are on the margins of their ranges. The survey also shows 158 species of exotic plants within the Preserve, some of which impe...