Increasing frequency of droughts and wildfire are sparking concerns that these compounded disturbance events are pushing forested ecosystems beyond recovery. An improved understanding of how compounded events affect tree physiology and mortality is needed given the reliance of fire management planning on accurate estimates of postfire tree mortality. In this study, we use a toxicological dose-response approach to quantify the...

Fire–vegetation feedbacks potentially maintain global savanna and forest distributions. Accordingly, vegetation in savanna and forest ecosystems should have differential responses to fire, but fire response data for herbaceous vegetation have yet to be synthesized across biomes. Here, we examined herbaceous vegetation responses to experimental fire at 30 sites spanning four continents. Across a variety of metrics, herbaceous v...

Key message Hygroscopicity is a crucial element of bark water storage and can reach >60% of water holding capacity of bark depending on tree species Abstract Bark forms the outer layer of woody plants, and it is directly exposed to wetting during rainfall and reacts to changes in relative humidity, i.e., it may exchange water with the atmosphere through absorption and desorption of water vapor. A current paradigm of bark hydro...

Predicting the effects of dissolved organic matter (DOM) on pelagic food webs can be difficult because DOM modifies water column optics and can have contrasting effects on species across trophic levels. We combined large mesocosm, smaller‐scale experiments and autoregressive modeling driven bu DOC concentration or DOM optical quality (colored DOM, or CDOM, measured as DOC‐specific absorbance at 320 nm, SUVA 320 ) to assess how...

22In 2009, five unique methods were used to inspect vegetation-related conditions along Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) rights-of-way (ROW). Some methods were trials that BPA committed to execute as part of a settlement with its regional regulatory organization, the Western Electric Coordination Council (WECC), for violations of reliability standards from vegetation grow-in related outages. A combination of simple, strat...