Life Sciences Commons^™

Rapid Source To Sink Transition In A Mixed-Conifer Forest Following Stand-Replacing Fire, Ryan Matthew Schulze

Biology ETDs

Mixed-conifer forests play an important role in the Southwestern USA’s regional carbon cycle by sequestering and storing large amounts of atmospheric carbon onto the landscape. Despite this, little is known about how large, stand-replacing fire alters ecosystem carbon sink-source dynamics. In this study, we used eddy covariance to quantify how stand-replacing fire altered forest sink strength, and the sensitivity of carbon uptake to soil and atmospheric drought in a mixed-conifer forest located in The Valles Caldera National Preserve, NM. We found that the post-burn ecosystem returned to an annual net sink of carbon in the year immediately following the fire, …

Soil Macroinvertebrates Responses To Wildfires In The Blue Ridge Mountains, Usa, Madeline Olliff

Biology Theses

Fire has been a prevalent disturbance on Earth for millions of years. Around the globe there are several regions that have become fire adapted, including the Southeastern United States. There have been few studies examining the effects of wildland fires on soil macroinvertebrates in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in spite of the importance of these animals to soil processes and their contributions to the biodiversity of these ecosystems. During the fall of 2016, the Southeastern USA experienced numerous, large wildfires. These fires offered an opportunity to study the effects of wildland fire on soil macroinvertebrates. We sampled sites from three …

Linking Extreme High Air Temperature Events To Wildfire And Environmental Variation To Water Balance Partitioning In The Western Us, Neil Savage

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Chapter 1

Wildfire activity has increased across the western United States in recent decades, causing significant damage to ecosystem services and human communities. The Sierra Nevada region, in particular, has experienced substantial increases in the ignition frequency, severity, and extent of large wildfires. To partly disentangle the complex processes underlying wildfire risk, I developed a simple approach to link natural wildfire ignition patterns to changing seasonal temperatures and extreme high and low air temperature events across the Sierra Nevada region from 1992—2015. Extreme event analyses focused on the association between the magnitude and frequency of occurrence of extreme temperature events …