Maintaining and enhancing landscape connectivity reduces biodiversity declines due to habitat fragmentation. Uncertainty remains, however, about the effectiveness of conservation for enhancing connectivity for multiple species on dynamic landscapes, especially over long time horizons. We forecasted landscape connectivity from 2020 to 2100 under four common conservation land‐acquisition strategies: acquiring the lowest cost lan...

Quantifying the responses of forest disturbances to climate warming is critical to our understanding of carbon cycles and energy balances of the Earth system. The impact of warming on bark beetle outbreaks is complex as multiple drivers of these events may respond differently to warming. Using a novel model of bark beetle biology and host tree interactions, we assessed how contemporary warming affected western pine beetle ( De...

Emerald ash borer (EAB; Agrilus planipennis Farimaire) has been found in 35 US states and five Canadian provinces. This invasive beetle is causing widespread mortality to ash trees ( Fraxinus spp.), which are an important timber product and ornamental tree, as well as a cultural resource for some Tribes. The damage will likely continue despite efforts to impede its spread. Further, widespread and rapid ash mortality as a resul...

In frequent fire forests of the western United States, a legacy of fire suppression coupled with increases in fire weather severity have altered fire regimes and vegetation dynamics. When coupled with projected climate change, these conditions have the potential to lead to vegetation type change and altered carbon (C) dynamics. In the Sierra Nevada, fuels reduction approaches that include mechanical thinning followed by regula...

Understanding how climate change may influence forest carbon (C) budgets requires knowledge of forest growth relationships with regional climate, long‐term forest succession, and past and future disturbances, such as wildfires and timber harvesting events. We used a landscape‐scale model of forest succession, wildfire, and C dynamics ( LANDIS ‐ II ) to evaluate the effects of a changing climate (A2 and B1 IPCC emissions; Geoph...

Many studies have been conducted to quantify the possible ecosystem/landscape response to the anticipated global warming. However, there is a large amount of uncertainty in the future climate predictions used for these studies. Specifically, the climate predictions can be very different based on a variety of global climate models and alternative greenhouse emission scenarios. In this study, we coupled a forest landscape model,...

Projected temperature increases under global warming could benefit southern tree species by providing them the optimal growing temperature and could be detrimental to northern species by exposing them to the supra optimal growing temperatures. This benefit‐detriment trade‐off could increase the competitive advantage of southern species in the northern species range and cause the increase or even dominance of southern species i...

Residential development in rural forests is currently one of the most prominent land use changes in the United States. Such development can have important effects on ecosystem processes and landscape patterns. It can also constrain forest management on public lands, influencing tree species composition and age structure at the landscape scale. We used the forest landscape simulation model LANDIS-II to analyze changes to the la...

In the coming century, forecast climate changes caused by increasing greenhouse gases may produce dramatic shifts in tree species distributions and the rates at which individual tree species sequester carbon or release carbon back to the atmosphere. The species composition and carbon storage capacity of northern Wisconsin (USA) forests are expected to change significantly as a result. Projected temperature changes are relative...