Tidal marshes provide numerous ecosystem services, but are threatened by recent increases in global sea level rise (SLR). Marsh restoration and creation are important strategies for mitigating marsh loss, restoring ecosystem services, increasing coastal community resilience, and providing much needed habitat for threatened species. Dredged material resulting from navigation channel maintenance can provide a substrate for these...

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...

Tidal marsh restoration using dredged material is being undertaken in many coastal areas to replace lost habitat and ecosystem services due to tidal marsh loss. The fate of high levels of nitrogen (N) in fine-grained dredged material used as a substrate for marsh restoration is uncertain, but if exported tidally may cause subtidal habitat degradation. In this study, a mass balance was developed to characterize N fluxes in a tw...

Madagascar is regarded by some as one of the most degraded landscapes on Earth, with estimates suggesting that 90% of forests have been lost to indigenous Tavy farming. However, the extent of this degradation has been challenged: paleoecological data, phylogeographic analysis, and species richness indicate that pyrogenic savannas in central Madagascar predate human arrival, even though rainfall is sufficient to allow forest ex...

Understory fires represent an accelerating threat to Amazonian tropical forests and can, during drought, affect larger areas than deforestation itself. These fires kill trees at rates varying from 2 lost in Amazon understory fires between 2001 and 2010. Trait‐enabled global vegetation models that explicitly include variation in bark thickness are likely to improve the predictions of fire effects on carbon cycling in tropical f...

Aim The global distribution of biomes is not solely determined by climate. Top‐down processes, most notably fire, may substantially expand savannas into potentially forested areas. Here, we address an overlooked aspect of the existing literature: spatial patterns in savanna and forest distributions and the transitions between them, and whether current transitions could plausibly reproduce current distributions. Location Tropic...

Global change will likely affect savanna and forest structure and distributions, with implications for diversity within both biomes. Few studies have examined the impacts of both expected precipitation and land use changes on vegetation structure in the future, despite their likely severity. Here, we modeled tree cover in sub‐Saharan Africa, as a proxy for vegetation structure and land cover change, using climatic, edaphic, an...

In their recent paper, H anan et al . ( Global Ecology and Biogeography , 2014, 23 , 259–263) argue that the use of classification and regression trees ( CARTs ) to calibrate global remote sensing datasets, including the MODIS VCF tree‐cover dataset, makes these data inappropriate for analysing the frequency distribution of tree cover. While we agree with their most general point – that the use of remote sensing products shoul...