Environmental Monitoring Commons^™

Drought-Induced Shift Of A Forest–Woodland Ecotone: Rapid Landscape Response To Climate Variation, Craig Allen, David D. Breshears

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

In coming decades, global climate changes are expected to produce large shifts in vegetation distributions at unprecedented rates. These shifts are expected to be most rapid and extreme at ecotones, the boundaries between ecosystems, particularly those in semiarid landscapes. However, current models do not adequately provide for such rapid effects—particularly those caused by mortality—largely because of the lack of data from field studies. Here we report the most rapid landscape-scale shift of a woody ecotone ever documented: in northern New Mexico in the 1950s, the ecotone between semiarid ponderosa pine forest and pinon– juniper woodland shifted extensively (2 km or …