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Precipitation And Soil Properties Determine Long-Term Consequences Of Disturbance And Invasion In Drylands, Tyson Terry

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Disturbance and invasive species have dramatic effects on desert plant communities, often resulting in degradation or shifts to alternative plant communities. Climate and soil properties determine water availability to plants, and have been thought to drive patterns of recovery following disturbance and potential for invasion.

In chapter II we used a combination of natural gas pipelines and satellite imagery to understand how recovery from a uniform disturbance differs across precipitation and soil gradients. We used a recovery ratio (disturbed/undisturbed) of pipeline pixels and their undisturbed nearest neighbor pixel to quantify recovery in a comparable way across precipitation gradients. We found …

Regeneration Strategies And Forest Resilience To Changing Fire Regimes: Insights From A Goldilocks Model, Tanjona Ramiadantsoa, Zak Ratajczak, Monica G. Turner

Aspen Bibliography

Disturbances are ubiquitous in ecological systems, and species have evolved a range of strategies to resist or rebound following disturbance. Understanding how the presence and complementarity of regeneration traits will affect community responses to disturbance is increasingly urgent as disturbance regimes shift beyond their historical ranges of variability. We define "disturbance niche" as a species' fitness across a range of disturbance sizes and frequencies that can reflect the fundamental or realized niche, that is, whether the species occurs alone or with other species. We developed a model of intermediate complexity (i.e., a Goldilocks model) to infer the disturbance niche. We …