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Life Sciences Commons

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Climate change

Theses/Dissertations

Plant Sciences

Brigham Young University

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Of Fire, Mammals, And Rain: Mechanisms Of Plant Invasions, Tara Boyce Bishop Jul 2019

Of Fire, Mammals, And Rain: Mechanisms Of Plant Invasions, Tara Boyce Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Biological invasions are driving environmental state changes on a global scale. Exotic plant species must be successful at passing several abiotic and biotic filters to establish and disrupt the native plant community assembly. Understanding where exotic plants are on a regional scale and being able to characterize how exotic plants are generally interacting with their environment is crucial information for exotic species management (chapter 1). In the western United States human-related activities are augmenting the spread of exotic plant species by increasing the ignitions of wildfire. Wildfire can lead to nutrient pulses through the removal of intact native communities and …


Plant Functional Groups And Success In A Changing Environment: Modeling Physiological Niches Of Colorado Plateau Plants, Anne Thomas May 2018

Plant Functional Groups And Success In A Changing Environment: Modeling Physiological Niches Of Colorado Plateau Plants, Anne Thomas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Quantifying the environmental and physiological niches of plant species is crucial to predicting their sensitivity to global change, and aggregating plant species by functional type is fundamental both to ecological theory and to the practicality of large-scale efforts to predict the consequences of global change. However, traditional functional types are not always predictive of individual species’ responses to change. Here, an inverse species distribution modeling approach is used to identify functionally similar species based on physiological niche in order to better anticipate the consequences of climate change on the Colorado Plateau, USA. The Colorado Plateau is a semiarid region particularly …