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Congressionally designated wilderness offers the highest level of land protection in the USA, comparable to category 1b wilderness as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, yet wilderness areas face impacts of climate change. Researchers and managers increasingly recognize the immense challenge of stewarding wilderness in a changing climate. Although responding to climate change is considered a wicked p...
SNAPSHOT USA 2024: Year 6 of the Coordinated National Camera Trap Survey of the United StatesNARA Subscribed
Motivation SNAPSHOT USA is an annual, multi‐contributor camera trap survey of mammals across the United States. The growing SNAPSHOT USA dataset is intended for tracking the spatial and temporal responses of mammal populations to changes in land use, land cover and climate. These data will be useful for exploring the drivers of spatial and temporal changes in relative abundance and distribution, as well as the impacts of speci...
Alternative Future Vegetation Pathways Reveal Potential Transformations of Western US EcosystemsNARA Subscribed
Managing ecosystems in an era of rapid change is inherently challenging not only because of uncertainty in future climate but also due to diverse responses of ecosystems to climate. Projections of ecological transformation alongside information about plausible vegetation trajectories can help land managers explore divergent scenarios and consider how modeled outcomes match their observations. Climate‐analog impact models (AIMs...
Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US ForestsNARA Subscribed
Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire —fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities. Here, we quantified area burned and area burned severely in west...
Extreme Fire Spread Events Burn More Severely and Homogenize Postfire Landscapes in the Southwestern United StatesNARA Subscribed
Extreme fire spread events rapidly burn large areas with disproportionate impacts on people and ecosystems. Such events are associated with warmer and drier fire seasons and are expected to increase in the future. Our understanding of the landscape outcomes of extreme events is limited, particularly regarding whether they burn more severely or produce spatial patterns less conducive to ecosystem recovery. To assess relationshi...
Spatiotemporal Synchrony of Climate and Fire Occurrence Across North American Forests (1750–1880)NARA Subscribed
Aim Increasing aridity has driven widespread synchronous fire occurrence in recent decades across North America. The lack of historical (pre‐1880) fire records limits our ability to understand long‐term continental fire‐climate dynamics. The goal of this study is to use tree‐ring reconstructions to determine the relationships between spatiotemporal patterns in historical climate and widespread fire occurrence in North American...
SNAPSHOT USA 2019–2023: The First Five Years of Data From a Coordinated Camera Trap Survey of the United StatesNARA Subscribed
Motivation SNAPSHOT USA is an annual, multicontributor camera trap survey of mammals across the United States. The growing SNAPSHOT USA dataset is intended for tracking the spatial and temporal responses of mammal populations to changes in land use, land cover and climate. These data will be useful for exploring the drivers of spatial and temporal changes in relative abundance and distribution, as well as the impacts of specie...
A modest increase in fire weather overcomes resistance to fire spread in recently burned boreal forestsNARA Subscribed
Recently burned boreal forests have lower aboveground fuel loads, generating a negative feedback to subsequent wildfires. Despite this feedback, short‐interval reburns (≤20 years between fires) are possible under extreme weather conditions. Reburns have consequences for ecosystem recovery, leading to enduring vegetation change. In this study, we characterize the strength of the fire‐fuel feedback in recently burned Canadian bo...
SNAPSHOT USA 2021: A third coordinated national camera trap survey of the U nited S tatesNARA Subscribed
SNAPSHOT USA is a multicontributor, long‐term camera trap survey designed to survey mammals across the United States. Participants are recruited through community networks and directly through a website application ( https://www.snapshot-usa.org/ ). The growing Snapshot dataset is useful, for example, for tracking wildlife population responses to land use, land cover, and climate changes across spatial and temporal scales. Her...
Refuge‐yeah or refuge‐nah? Predicting locations of forest resistance and recruitment in a fiery worldNARA Subscribed
Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth's biota. Fire refugia—locations that are burned less frequently or severely than their surroundings—may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post‐fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their value to forest ecosy...
Protected areas not likely to serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate‐induced range shiftsNARA Subscribed
Species across the planet are shifting their ranges to track suitable climate conditions in response to climate change. Given that protected areas have higher quality habitat and often harbor higher levels of biodiversity compared to unprotected lands, it is often assumed that protected areas can serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate‐induced range shifts. However, there are several factors that may impede succ...
Extreme fire spread events and area burned under recent and future climate in the western USANARA Subscribed
Aim Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single‐day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities. Our objectives were to gain new insight into the relationships between extreme single‐day fire spread events, annual area burned, and fire season climate and to predict changes under future warming. Location Fire‐prone...
Six baleen whale species are found in the temperate western North Atlantic Ocean, with limited information existing on the distribution and movement patterns for most. There is mounting evidence of distributional shifts in many species, including marine mammals, likely because of climate‐driven changes in ocean temperature and circulation. Previous acoustic studies examined the occurrence of minke ( Balaenoptera acutorostrata...
Climate connectivity, the ability of a landscape to promote or hinder the movement of organisms in response to a changing climate, is contingent on multiple factors including the distance organisms need to move to track suitable climate over time (i.e. climate velocity) and the resistance they experience along such routes. An additional consideration which has received less attention is that human land uses increase resistance...
Climatic, topographic, and anthropogenic factors determine connectivity between current and future climate analogs in North AmericaNARA Subscribed
As climatic conditions shift in coming decades, persistence of many populations will depend on their ability to colonize habitat newly suitable for their climatic requirements. Opportunities for such range shifts may be limited unless areas that facilitate dispersal under climate change are identified and protected from land uses that impede movement. While many climate adaptation strategies focus on identifying refugia, this...
Potential relocation of climatic environments suggests high rates of climate displacement within the North American protection networkNARA Subscribed
Ongoing climate change may undermine the effectiveness of protected area networks in preserving the set of biotic components and ecological processes they harbor, thereby jeopardizing their conservation capacity into the future. Metrics of climate change, particularly rates and spatial patterns of climatic alteration, can help assess potential threats. Here, we perform a continent‐wide climate change vulnerability assessment w...
The potential and realized spread of wildfires across CanadaNARA Subscribed
Given that they can burn for weeks or months, wildfires in temperate and boreal forests may become immense (eg., 10 0 – 10 4 km 2 ). However, during the period within which a large fire is ‘active’, not all days experience weather that is conducive to fire spread; indeed most of the spread occurs on a small proportion (e.g., 1 – 15 days) of not necessarily consecutive days during the active period. This study examines and comp...