Stephen H. Roxburgh's research while affiliated with The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and other places
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Publications (128)
Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting of emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry necessarily involves consideration of landscape fire. This is of particular importance for Australia given that natural and human fire is a common occurrence, and many ecosystems are adapted to fire, and require periodic burning for plant regeneration and ecol...
Understanding carbon sequestration from tree planting and management activities is important for contributing to the mitigation of climate change. Although rates of growth and resulting sequestration of carbon in live above-ground biomass are relatively well understood in various woody plantings and commercial plantations in Australia, less is know...
Disturbance trends over recent decades indicate that climate change is resulting in increased fire severity and extent in Australia's temperate Eucalyptus forests. As disturbance cycles become shorter and more severe, empirical measurements are required to identify potential change in forest carbon (C) stock and emissions. However, such estimates a...
A globally relevant and standardized taxonomy and framework for consistently describing land cover change based on evidence is presented, which makes use of structured land cover taxonomies and is underpinned by the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. The Global Change Taxonomy currently lists 246 classes based on the notation...
Commercial plantations and farm forestry have the potential to increase the average carbon storage in woody biomass through afforestation, integration of belt plantings into farms, or increasing the average length of harvest rotations. In Australia, such increases in carbon storage are estimated at national- and project-scale through application of...
Disturbances are important determinants of diversity, and the combination of their aspects (e.g., disturbance intensity, frequency) can result in complex diversity patterns. Here, we leverage an important approach to classifying disturbances in terms of temporal span to understand the implications for species coexistence: pulse disturbances are acu...
Aim: The increasing availability of regional and global climate data presents an opportunity to build better ecological models; however, it is not always clear which climate dataset is most appropriate. The aim of this study was to better understand the impacts that alternative climate datasets have on the modelled distribution of plant species, an...
Harnessing sustainably sourced forest biomass for renewable energy is well-established in some parts of the developed world. Forest-based bioenergy has the potential to offset carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, thereby playing a role in climate change mitigation. Despite having an established commercial forestry industry, with large quanti...
This Good Practice Guidance (GPG) document provides guidance on how to calculate the extent of land degradation for reporting on United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 15.3.1: the proportion of land that is degraded over total land area. This guidance supports implementation of the Tier I methods for Indicator 15.3.1 adopt...
Prescribed fire to reduce forest fuels has been routinely applied to reduce wildfire risk in many parts of the world. It has also been proposed that prescribed fire can be used to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although prescribed fire creates emissions, if the treatment also decreases the incidence of subsequent wildfires, it is possible...
Extreme weather can have significant impacts on plant species demography; however, most studies have focused on responses to a single or small number of extreme events. Long‐term patterns in climate extremes, and how they have shaped contemporary distributions, have rarely been considered or tested. BIOCLIM variables that are commonly used in corre...
Key message
Crown variables and height can improve biomass predictions and may help to quantify how tree biomass is influenced by inter-tree competition (stand density, species composition), climate, edaphic conditions, and age.
Abstract
Tree biomass is influenced by tree age, stand structural characteristics, and climatic and edaphic site factors...
Disturbance is a key factor shaping ecological communities, but little is understood about how the effects of disturbance processes accumulate over time. When disturbance regimes change, historical processes may influence future community structure, for example, by altering invasibility compared to communities with stable regimes. Here, we use an a...
This paper reviews information about field observations of vegetation productivity in Australia’s rangeland systems and identifies the need to establish a national initiative to collect net primary productivity (NPP) and biomass data for rangeland pastures. Productivity data are needed for vegetation and carbon model parameterisation, calibration a...
Typical soil organic carbon (SOC) measurements do not account for the higher SOC concentration adjacent to, inside and under the trunks of large trees, or for the root volume which displaces soil and thereby reduces spatial density of SOC. Any net difference between these two omissions could have a significant impact on carbon accounts for the conv...
To constrain global warming, we must strongly curtail greenhouse gas emissions and capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide1,2. Regrowing natural forests is a prominent strategy for capturing additional carbon³, but accurate assessments of its potential are limited by uncertainty and variability in carbon accumulation rates2,3. To assess why and w...
This report complements the conceptualisation of forestry’s interaction with natural capital (O’Grady et al. 2020) and tests the development of natural capital accounts for the forestry industry in the Green Triangle. While primarily our aim was to develop natural capital accounts at the enterprise scale, this report presents a set of experimental...
Above‐ground biomass in forests is critical to the global carbon cycle as it stores and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Climate change will disrupt the carbon cycle hence understanding how climate and other abiotic variables determine forest biomass at broad spatial scales is important for validating and constraining Earth System models and...
Lycaenidae is one of the larger of the world's butterfly families, based on number and diversity of species, but knowledge of roosting in this group is sparse. Zizina otis riukuensis and Zizeeria maha okinawana are two small lycaenids that are commonly found in urban settings and widely distributed across much of Asia. We conducted experiments on a...
Land restoration through planting native species or facilitating natural regeneration may provide opportunities for sequestration of biomass carbon in many regions where woody vegetation has been cleared or largely supressed. Australia provides a good case study of how sequestration from these activities may be simulated at national- and project-sc...
In this study, solid state 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to explore the carbon-containing functional groups present in pyrogenic carbon (PyC) produced during different fire spread modes to forest litter fuels from a dry sclerophyll eucalypt forest burnt in a combustion wind tunnel. A replicated experimental study was pe...
Forest fires are a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Accurate reporting of GHG
emissions from forest fires requires development of detailed methodologies and country specific data for estimating
emissions. In recent years, Australia has updated its national methodology for reporting GHG emissions
from fires on temper...
Extreme disturbance events, such as wildfire and drought, have large impacts on carbon storage and sequestration of forests and woodlands globally. Here, we present a modelling approach that assesses the relative impact of disturbances on carbon storage and sequestration, and how this will alter under climate change. Our case study is semi-arid Aus...
Most people can readily identify a forest, or a grassland, or a wetland - these are the simple labels we give different plant communities. The aim of this book is to move beyond these simple descriptions to investigate the 'hidden' structure of vegetation, asking questions such as how do species in a community persist over time? What prevents the s...
Accurate quantification of below-ground biomass (BGB) of woody vegetation is critical to understanding ecosystem function and potential for climate change mitigation from sequestration of biomass carbon. We compiled 2054 measurements of planted and natural individual tree and shrub biomass from across different regions of Australia (arid shrublands...
Modern approaches to predictive ecosystem mapping (PEM) have not thoroughly explored the use of ‘characteristic’ gradients, which describe vegetation structure (e.g., light detection and ranging (lidar)-derived structural profiles). In this study, we apply a PEM approach by classifying the dominant stand types within the Central Highlands region of...
The carbon accounting model FullCAM is used in Australia?s National Greenhous Gas Inventory to provide estimates of carbon stock changes and emissions in response to deforestation and afforestation/reforestation. FullCAM-predicted above-ground woody biomass is heavily influenced by the parameter M, which defines the maximum upper limit to biomass a...
We present an investigation of the effects of disturbance and fecundity–tolerance strategies on community composition. We develop a theoretical model and apply it to macrofaunal communities at deep‐sea hydrothermal vents. We characterize community outcomes and find that dominance, coexistence, and alternative stable equilibria can all result from t...
The Australian land sector has the potential to make a significant contribution to climate change mitigation efforts through the sequestration of carbon in vegetation and soils. So far only a small proportion of this potential has been realised. A complicating factor is the inherently uncertain and reversible nature of biological sequestration, com...
Reforestation schemes, which encompass environmental plantings and natural regeneration of vegetation on cleared land, are increasingly being established for the purposes of mitigating anthropogenic carbon emissions. However, these schemes are themselves at risk from climate change and associated changes in disturbance regimes. Simultaneously, ther...
Analysis of growth and biomass turnover in natural forests of Eucalyptus regnans, the world's tallest angiosperm, reveals it is also the world's most productive forest type, with fire disturbance an important mediator of net primary productivity (NPP). A comprehensive empirical database was used to calculate the averaged temporal pattern of NPP fro...
There is high uncertainty in the contribution of land-use change to anthropogenic climate change, especially pertaining to below-ground carbon loss resulting from conversion of primary-to-secondary forest. Soil organic carbon (SOC) and coarse roots are concentrated close to tree trunks, a region usually unmeasured during soil carbon sampling. Soil...
Stem diameter is one of the most common measurements made to assess the growth of woody vegetation, and the commercial and environmental benefits that it provides (e.g. wood or biomass products, carbon sequestration, landscape remediation). Yet inconsistency in its measurement is a continuing source of error in estimates of stand-scale measures suc...
Accurate assessment of environmental variables is vital to understanding the global issues of land-use change and climate change, but is hindered by their high spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Extensive surveys are needed to model such large-scale problems, with their success dependent on adequate sampling protocols. We present a robust method f...
Accurate estimates of biomass are required for relating ecosystem functioning to atmospheric carbon regulation. Biomass may be directly measured through field sampling, which can then be used to calibrate biomass predictions from remote sensing and/or modelling. Field sampling generally entails measuring the fresh mass of individual trees or shrubs...
Spatial climate datasets currently available for Bhutan are limited by weather station data availability, spatial resolution, or interpolation methodology. This paper presents new datasets for monthly maximum temperature, minimum temperature, precipitation and vapour pressure climate normals interpolated for the 1986-2015 reference period using tri...
Estimates of greenhouse gases and particulate emissions are made with a high spatio-temporal resolution from the Kilmore East fire in Victoria, Australia, which burnt approximately 100 000 hectares over a 12 hour period. Altogether, 10 175 Gigagrams (Gg) of CO2 equivalent (CO2-e) emissions occurred, with CO2(∼68%) being the dominant chemical specie...
Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary References
Vegetation fires are a complex phenomenon in the Earth system with many global impacts, including influences on global climate. Estimating carbon emissions from vegetation fires relies on a carbon mass balance technique that has evolved with two different interpretations. Databases of global vegetation fire emissions use an approach based on 'consu...
Fire managers around the world commonly use visual assessment of forest fuels to aid prediction of fire behaviour and plan for hazard reduction burning. In Australia, fuel hazard assessment guides also allow conversion of visual assessments to indicative fuel loads, which is essential for some rate of spread models and calculation of fireline inten...
Accurate ground-based estimation of the carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems is critical to quantifying the global carbon budget. Allometric models provide cost-effective methods for biomass prediction. But do such models vary with ecoregion or plant functional type? We compiled 15,054 measurements of individual tree or shrub biomass from across...
The surge in global efforts to understand the causes and consequences of drought on forest ecosystems has tended to focus on specific impacts such as mortality. We propose an eco-climatic framework that takes a broader view of the ecological relevance of water deficits, linking elements of exposure and resilience to cumulative impacts on a range of...
There is increasing reliance on ecological models to improve our understanding of how ecological systems work, to project likely outcomes under alternative global change scenarios and to help develop robust management strategies. Two common types of spatiotemporally explicit ecological models are those focussed on biodiversity composition and those...
The recent development of biomass markets and carbon trading has led to increasing interest in obtaining accurate estimates of woody biomass production. Aboveground woody biomass ( B ) is often estimated indirectly using allometric models, where representative individuals are harvested and weighed, and regression analyses used to generalise the rel...
In this issue of the Journal of Vegetation Science, Michalet et al. used species removal experiments to detect direct and indirect species interactions in a sub-alpine grassland. They found evidence for competition, facilitation and a range of indirect interactions at the species level, but no measurable effects when aggregated at the community lev...
Plantings of mixed native species (termed ‘environmental plantings’) are increasingly being established for carbon sequestration whilst providing additional environmental benefits such as biodiversity and water quality. In Australia, they are currently one of the most common forms of reforestation. Investment in establishing and maintaining such pl...
Free-burning experimental fires were conducted in a wind tunnel to explore the role of ignition type and thus fire spread mode on the resulting emissions profile from combustion of fine (< 6 mm in diameter) Eucalyptus litter fuels. Fires were burnt spreading with the wind (heading fire), perpendicular to the wind (flanking fire) and against the win...
Root biomass may to contribute a substantial proportion of the carbon sequestered in new tree plantings, particularly in regions where rainfall and/or site quality is relatively low as this may result in relatively high allocation of plant biomass below-ground to source required water or nutrients. However, root biomass is often overlooked because...
Crop rotation has long been considered one of the simplest and most effective tools for managing weeds. In this paper, we demonstrate how crop rotations can be strategically arranged to harness a novel mechanism of weed suppression: weed-weed competition. Specifically, we consider how crop stacking, or increasing the number of consecutive plantings...
To quantify the impact that planting indigenous trees and shrubs in mixed communities (environmental plantings) have on net sequestration of carbon and other environmental or commercial benefits, precise and non-biased estimates of biomass are required. Because these plantings consist of several species, estimation of their biomass through allometr...
Allometric relationships are commonly used to estimate average biomass of trees of a particular size and to predict biomass of individual trees based on an easily measured covariate variable such as stem diameter. They are typically power relationships which, for the purpose of data fitting, are transformed using natural logarithms to convert the m...
In medium-low (250-850 mm year−1) rainfall regions of southern Australia, reforestation with mallee eucalypts is promoted for biomass production for carbon sequestration and/or bioenergy. Cost-effective estimation of biomass is essential for assessing the economic viability of plantings. To explore this, we collated biomass data from 198 stands in...
[1] We propose and demonstrate a new approach for the simulation of woody ecosystem stand dynamics, demography, and disturbance-mediated heterogeneity suitable for continental to global applications and designed for coupling to the terrestrial ecosystem component of any earth system model. The approach is encoded in a model called Populations-Order...
Information about the carbon cycle potentially constrains the water
cycle, and vice versa. This paper explores the utility of multiple
observation sets to constrain carbon and water fluxes and stores in a
land surface model, and a resulting determination of the Australian
terrestrial carbon budget. Observations include streamflow from 416
gauged ca...
Information about the carbon cycle potentially constrains the water
cycle, and vice versa. This paper explores the utility of multiple
observation sets to constrain a land surface model of Australian
terrestrial carbon and water cycles, and the resulting mean carbon pools
and fluxes, as well as their temporal and spatial variability.
Observations i...
Overview: During the last two years, a major nationally-collaborative research program has been lead by CSIRO to improve the estimation of biomass accumulation by mixed-species environmental plantings and mallee eucalypt plantings. It has involved evaluation of the uncertainties associated with using alternative approaches to biomass estimation, an...
Ecologists have long studied the effects of disturbance on species diversity. More recently, researchers have become interested in understanding how the various aspects of disturbance interact to influence community diversity. While the effects of temporal autocorrelation have also received some attention, the potential for manipulating disturbance...
Information about the carbon cycle potentially constrains the water cycle, and vice versa. This paper explores the utility of multiple observation sets to constrain a land surface model of Australian terrestrial carbon and water cycles, and the resulting mean carbon pools and fluxes, as well as their temporal and spatial variability. Observations i...
Ecological disturbance is inherently a multi-faceted phenomenon; disturbance events can differ in distinct quantifiable aspects,
such as intensity, duration, spatial extent, and time since last disturbance. Though effects of disturbance timing (specifically,
time within a season) have been investigated empirically, theoretical work is lacking, in p...
An influential ecological theory, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), predicts that intermediate levels of disturbance will maximize species diversity. Empirical studies, however, have described a wide variety of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Using experimental populations of microbes, we show that the form of the DDR depen...
Employing rangelands for climate change mitigation is hindered by conflicting reports on the direction and magnitude of change in soil organic carbon (ΔSOC) following changes in woody cover. Publications on woody thickening and deforestation, which had led to uncertainty in ΔSOC, were re-evaluated, and the dimensional-dependence of their data was d...
In contrast with the fundamental ecological expectation that similarity induces competition and loss of species, temporal dynamics allows similar species to co-occur. In fact, the coexistence of similar species contributes significantly to species diversity and could affect ecosystem response to climate change. However, because temporal processes t...
Prescribed fire can potentially reduce carbon emissions from unplanned fires. This potential will differ among ecosystems owing to inherent differences in the efficacy of prescribed burning in reducing unplanned fire activity (or ‘leverage’, i.e. the reduction in area of unplanned fire per unit area of prescribed fire). In temperate eucalypt forest...
Carbon finance offers the potential to change land management and conservation planning priorities. We develop a novel approach to planning for improved land management to conserve biodiversity while utilizing potential revenue from carbon biosequestration. We apply our approach in northern Australia's tropical savanna, a region of global significa...
Background/Question/Methods
Mixed-species native plantings established on previously cleared land are becoming increasingly popular for their carbon mitigation benefits, as well as contributing to other ecosystem values such as biodiversity and groundwater salinity control. From an economic perspective, investment in such sequestration schemes re...
Understanding the relationship between disturbance regimes and species diversity has been of central interest to ecologists for decades. For example, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis proposes that diversity will be highest at intermediate levels of disturbance. Although peaked (hump-shaped) diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs) have bee...
Background/Question/Methods
Disturbance has many effects on natural communities, such as removal of biomass, reduction of fecundity, or stimulation of growth. A physical characterization of a disturbance event must describe its intensity, duration, and extent. Moreover, species' responses to disturbance depend on within-season timing, and time sin...
