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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Dendrochronological Methods To Examine Plant Competition With Changing Fire Regimes In Desert And Forest Ecosystems, Rebecca Irene Lee
Dendrochronological Methods To Examine Plant Competition With Changing Fire Regimes In Desert And Forest Ecosystems, Rebecca Irene Lee
Theses and Dissertations
Human activities are changing wildfire regimes globally through ignition, spread of invasive species, fire suppression, and climate change. Because of this, ecosystems are experiencing novel fire regimes that may alter plant growth and patterns of succession. Annual growth rings are one metric that can track changes in tree and shrub growth patterns over time in response to changing fire frequency. In Chapter 1 we explored the effects of fire on resprouting native shrubs in the Mojave Desert. Fires are becoming increasingly frequent due to the spread of highly flammable invasive grasses in the region. We monitored growth and fruit production …
Historic Fire Regimes On Eastern Great Basin (Usa) Mountains Reconstructed From Tree Rings, Stanley G. Kitchen
Historic Fire Regimes On Eastern Great Basin (Usa) Mountains Reconstructed From Tree Rings, Stanley G. Kitchen
Theses and Dissertations
Management of natural landscapes requires knowledge of key disturbance processes and their effects. Fire and forest histories provide valuable insight into how fire and vegetation varied and interacted in the past. I constructed multi-century fire chronologies for 10 sites on six mountain ranges representative of the eastern Great Basin (USA), a region in which historic fire information was lacking. I also constructed tree recruitment chronologies for two sites. I use these chronologies to address three research foci. First, using fire-scar data from four heterogeneous sites, I assert that mean fire interval (MFI) values calculated from composite chronologies provide suitable estimates …