Sarah Elizabeth Gergel

University of British Columbia | UBC · Forest and Conservation Sciences

Background A clear understanding of the connectivity, structure, and composition of wildland fuels is essential for effective wildfire management. However, fuel typing and mapping are challenging owing to a broad diversity of fuel conditions and their spatial and temporal heterogeneity. In Canada, fuel types and potential fire behavior are characte...

Context Increasing agricultural production shapes the flow of ecosystem services (ES), including provisioning services that support the livelihoods and nutrition of people in tropical developing countries. Although our broad understanding of the social-ecological consequences of agricultural intensification is growing, how it impacts provisioning E...

Restoring current ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. Ex P. and C. Laws)-dominated forests (also known as “dry forests”) to spatially resilient stand structures requires an adequate understanding of the overstory spatial variation of forests least impacted by Euro-American settlers (also known as “reference conditions”) and how much contemporary...

Cumulative effects assessments in Canada are increasingly expected to include social impacts from resource development and land-use actions on people, their communities, and livelihoods. As processes and methods for assessing cumulative social effects develop, it is important to understand the capacity needs for implementing such an assessment. Thi...

Context In fire-excluded forests across western North America, recent intense wildfire seasons starkly contrast with fire regimes of the past. The last 100 years mark a transition between pre-colonial and modern era fire regimes, providing crucial context for understanding future wildfire behavior. Objectives Using the greatest time depth of digiti...

Background Growing evidence suggests that exposure to green space is associated with improved childhood health and development, but the influence of different green space types remains relatively unexplored. In the present study, we investigated the association between early-life residential exposure to vegetation and early childhood development an...

Cumulative effects assessments are often expected to include an analysis of cumulative social effects to people, their communities, and livelihoods caused by resource development projects and land use activities. Understanding cumulative social effects is important for decisions about prospective resource development projects, but there has been li...

Background: Exposure to greenspace is associated with improved childhood development, but the pathways behind this relationship are insufficiently understood. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the association between lifetime residential exposure to greenspace and early childhood development and evaluate the extent to which this association is me...

ContextIn fire-excluded forests across western North America, recent intense wildfire seasons starkly contrast with fire regimes of the past. The last 100 years mark a transition between pre-colonial and modern era fire regimes, providing crucial context for understanding future wildfire behavior.Objectives Using the greatest time depth of digitize...

The outcomes of environmental impact assessment (EIA) influence millions of hectares of land and can be a contentious process. A vital aspect of an EIA process is consideration of the accumulation of impacts from multiple activities and stressors through a cumulative effects assessment (CEA). An opportunity exists to improve the rigor and utility o...

Despite global commitments to forest restoration, evidence of the pathways through which restoration creates social and ecological benefits remains limited. The objective of this paper is to provide empirical evidence to generate insights on the relationship between forest cover change and key provisioning ecosystem services and reforestation pathw...

Staple crops are grown by millions of smallholder farmers yet estimating field-level yields over broad regions can be challenging. Furthermore, agricultural productivity can be impacted by nearby forests and trees. In an agricultural-forest mosaic in Southern Ethiopia, we used remote sensing imagery to identify and differentiate among dominant crop...

Malnutrition linked to poor quality diets affects at least 2 billion people. Forests, as well as agricultural systems linked to trees, are key sources of dietary diversity in rural settings. In the present article, we develop conceptual links between diet diversity and forested landscape mosaics within the rural tropics. First, we summarize the sta...

Understanding the factors influencing agricultural productivity is vital to food security, especially for food insecure smallholder farmers. Within agricultural landscape mosaics, the arrangement of tree cover such as forests, trees, and hedgerows can positively or negatively impact agricultural productivity in fields. In such settings, forest rest...

Background Growing evidence suggests health benefits of natural environments. Yet, the effects of different types of natural environments (vegetation and water features) and forms of human-nature contact (access versus exposure) remain relatively unexplored. Methods A cross-sectional observational survey was used to analyse the relationship betwee...

Pan-Pacific cities are home to nearly 55% of the world’s urban residents. As the fastest growing urban centers in the world, their growth comes with increasing demand for urban amenities such as greenspace. Yet, our understanding of greenspace trends within and among pan-Pacific cities is limited due to a lack of consistent long-term land cover dat...

Consensus on the state of rangelands is often elusive. This is especially true in the primarily agropastoral former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Some argue Kyrgyz rangeland is being rapidly degraded by overgrazing. However, poor data and climatic changes confound this assessment. Thus there is contention amongst researchers, state officials, and...

A diverse diet is important to address micronutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition, one of the greatest challenges of today's food systems. In tropical countries, several studies have found a positive association between forest cover and dietary diversity, although the actual mechanisms of this has yet to be identified and quantified...

Participatory mapping is a valuable approach for documenting the influence of human activities on species, ecosystems, and ecosystem services, as well as the variability of human activities over space and time. This method is particularly valuable in data-poor systems; however, there has never been a systematic approach for identifying the total nu...

Context It remains unclear how agricultural landscapes can best serve multiple purposes such as simultaneously maintaining agricultural productivity and conserving biodiversity. Objectives Our objective was to assess how important components of biodiversity changed with different land covers, and to uncover whether particular landscapes could simu...

Hedgerows and riparian buffers in agricultural landscapes can help increase landscape multifunctionality and thereby mitigate conflicts among agricultural production and environmental stewardship objectives. However, the relative merits of conserving versus increasing non-production perennial vegetation (NPPV) are not well understood despite the un...

Mapping landcover in cities is essential for urban ecology and landuse management, yet urban landcover is often highly heterogeneous at fine spatial scales. Pixel-based approaches are shown to be less successful for effectively mapping urban landcover due to high heterogeneity, with relatively low accuracies reported despite the use of high spatial...

Locally sustainable resource extraction activities, at times, transform into ecologically detrimental enterprises. Understanding such transitions is a primary challenge for conservation and management of many ecosystems. In marine systems, over-exploitation of small-scale fisheries creates problems such as reduced biodiversity and lower catches. Ho...

Summary information about 23 fishing communities in the central Danajon Bank, Philippines including population sizes, sample sizes, and the presence of fishers’ organizations and MPAs. (PDF)

Summary of GLS model statistics for changes in the total fishing effort (fishing days per year by fishers in participating villages) allocated to gears in the central Danajon Bank, Philippines (1960–2010). Full models tested the effects of year and governance period, and their interaction on total fishing effort by each category of fishing gear. Mo...

Summary of GLS model statistics for changes in the relative fishing effort (percentage of fishing days per year) allocated to gears in the central Danajon Bank, Philippines (1960–2010). Full models tested the effects of year and governance period, and their interaction on relative fishing effort by each category of fishing gear. Models considered c...

Summary of GLS model statistics for changes in the proportion of fishers using various fishing gears in a year in the central Danajon Bank, Philippines (1960–2010). Full models tested the effects of year and governance period, and their interaction on the percentage of fishers by each category of fishing gear. Models considered changes in the use o...

ContextThe application of regional-level airborne lidar (light detection and ranging) data to characterize habitat patches and model habitat connectivity over large landscapes has not been well explored. Maintaining a connected network of habitat in the presence of anthropogenic disturbances is essential for regional-level conservation planning and...

Planting hedgerows on farm field edges can help mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural landscapes by sequestering carbon (C) in woody biomass and in soil. Sequestration rates however, must be assessed in terms of their overall global warming potential (GWP) which must also consider GHG emissions. The objectives of this study were...

The authors regret a citation error referencing authorship of an article by Hoppe et al. (2016) as having been authored by Franziska et al. (2016). The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Rangelands are among the most extensive anthropogenic landscapes on earth, supporting nearly 500 million people. Disagreements over the extent and severity of rangeland degradation affect pastoralist livelihoods, especially when impacts of drought and over-grazing are confounded. While vegetation indices (such as NDVI, or Normalized Difference Vege...

The expansion of agriculture has resulted in large-scale habitat loss, the fragmentation of forests, significant losses in biological diversity and negative impacts on many ecosystem services. In this paper, we highlight the Agrarian Change Project, a multidisciplinary research initiative, that applies detailed socio-ecological methodologies in mul...

ContextDespite continued forest cover losses in many parts of the world, Atlantic Forest, one of the largest of the Americas, is increasing in some locations. Economic factors are suggested as causes of forest gain, while enforcement has reduced deforestation. Objectives We examine three aspects of this issue: the relative importance of biophysical...

Landscape management is increasingly focused on trade-offs among various ecosystem services. For example, while clearing forests may produce timber and provide land for agriculture, it also releases significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, influencing the global climate system. Evaluating the tradeoffs among ecosystem services is made diffi...

Ecosystems are shaped by natural processes such as predator–prey interactions and climate, as well as by human activities such as harvesting and pollution. Resilient ecosystems are able to absorb disturbances, but chronic stressors may reduce the capacity of an ecosystem to cope with change (Trends Ecol Evol 15:413–417, 2000). The ability of ecosys...

Historic patterns and spatial heterogeneity of past landscapes can greatly influence dynamics of contemporary landscapes. Historical conditions lay the foundation for contemporary management options and can help guide restoration goals. While historical spatial data sources are not extremely common, historical aerial photography is among the longes...

River-floodplains are hotspots for many ecosystem services (ES), and thus, understanding how these services are spatially organized along river systems is essential. General principles from river-floodplain ecology may provide guidance for understanding these spatial patterns, yet such concepts have rarely been incorporated into spatial assessments...

(Full paper now available to view here: http://rdcu.be/GVA4) Despite internationally recognized definitions, there remains debate over what constitutes ‘actual’ degradation in various agro-pastoral contexts. This contention is especially pronounced in post-Soviet Central Asia. In this paper, we report on new interview data from the post- Soviet K...

Ecologically based strategies for climate change adaptation can be constructively integrated into a terrestrial conservation assessment for Canada's boreal forest, one of Earth's largest remaining wilderness areas. Identifying solutions that minimize variability in projected vegetation productivity may represent a less risky conservation investment...

Ecosystem services (ES) span the interface of social and ecological systems, which makes them inherently challenging to measure. Tracking ES patterns over long time frames is crucial for understanding slow variables and complex interactions, but long-term studies of ES are rare. Historical records can play an important role in revealing temporal pa...

Understanding the development of landscape patterns over broad spatial and temporal scales is a major contribution to ecological sciences and is a critical area of research for for-ested land management. Boreal forests represent an excellent case study for such research because these forests have undergone significant changes over recent decades. W...

Annualized pattern indices for 10,000 ha landscapes. (TAR)

Annualized pattern indices for 25,000 ha landscapes. (TAR)

Annualized pattern indices for 50,000 ha landscapes. (TAR)

Detailed habitat maps are critical for conservation planning, yet for many coastal habitats only coarse-resolution maps are available. As the logistic and technological constraints of habitat mapping become increasingly tractable, habitat map comparisons are warranted. Here we compare two mapping approaches: local environmental knowledge (LEK) obta...

Dramatic changes in ecosystem services have motivated recent work characterizing their interactions, including identifying trade-offs and synergies. Although time is arguably implicit in these ideas of trade-offs and synergies (e.g., temporal dynamics or changes in ecosystem services), such interactions are routinely inferred based on the spatial r...

Climate change is leading to the global loss of open montane meadows by facilitating tree and shrub encroachment at high elevations. North America’s coastal mountains are particularly vulnerable to these changes, as they are relatively low elevation compared with interior mountains and contain only small areas of alpine tundra. We compared aerial p...

Detailed habitat maps are critical for conservation planning, yet for many coastal habitats only coarse-resolution maps are available. As the logistic and technological constraints of habitat mapping become increasingly tractable, habitat map comparisons are warranted. Here we compare two mapping approaches: local environmental knowledge (LEK) obta...

North America's coastal mountains are particularly vulnerable to climate change, yet harbour a number of endemic species. With little room "at the top" to track shifting climate envelopes, alpine species may be especially negatively affected by climate-induced habitat fragmentation. We ask how climate change will affect the total amount, mean patch...

Hedgerows (also known as field margins, shelterbelts, or windbreaks) have the potential to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural activities through carbon

Mixed-severity fire regimes are important drivers of forest dynamics, stand structural attributes, and regional and local landscape heterogeneity, but they remain poorly understood. We reconstructed site-level fire histories using fire scars and even-aged cohorts at 20 sites in two contiguous watersheds in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, a r...

Resource development can have significant consequences for the distribution of vegetation cover and for species persistence. Modelling changes to anthropogenic disturbance regimes over time can provide profound insights into the mechanisms that drive land cover change. We analyzed the spatial patterns of anthropogenic disturbance before and after a...

Context Understanding the consequences of changes in land use and land cover is among the greatest challenges in sustainability science, yet key themes related to land cover change are often left out of sustainability assessment tools. Because sustainability teaching is expanding at a rapid rate, incorporation of interdisciplinary, rigorous, quanti...

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...

Information derived from high spatial resolution remotely sensed data is critical for the effective management of forested ecosystems. However, high spatial resolution data-sets are typically costly to acquire and process and usually provide limited geographic coverage. In contrast, moderate spatial resolution remotely sensed data, while not able t...

The accelerated development of energy resources around the world has substantially increased forest change related to oil and gas activities. In some cases, oil and gas activities are the primary catalyst of land-use change in forested landscapes. We discuss the challenges associated with characterizing ecological change related to energy resource...

The development of robust approaches for monitoring forest cover is a fundamental forest management objective. Timely and detailed mapping of forest disturbance can be used to identify threatened habitat, estimate standing forest carbon stocks, and aid in the sustainable management of forests. Remote sensing technologies have provided new opportuni...

Introduction Historical frontier expansion in North America has played a foundational role in shaping contemporary landscapes, yet early-settlement patterns are poorly quantified. Historic datasets such as land surveys have been underutilized in this context as they have been primarily used for historical ecological research on vegetation patterns....

Assessing connectivity of the marine environment is a fundamental challenge for marine conservation and planning, yet conceptual development in habitat connectivity has been based on terrestrial examples rather than marine ecosystems. Here, we explore differences in marine environments that could affect localized movement of marine organisms and de...

Background/Question/Methods Agricultural biodiversity is essential to local and global food security, yet is being rapidly eroded world-wide. The increasing reach of global transportation and trade networks is predicted to homogenize agriculture at regional scales. However, relatively little is known about how cultural values and norms, as reflec...