Nature‐based climate solutions are a vital component of many climate mitigation strategies, including California's, which aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. Most carbon offsets in California's cap‐and‐trade program come from improved forest management (IFM) projects. Since 2012, various landowners have set up IFM projects following the California Air Resources Board's IFM protocol. As many of these projects approach th...

Forests are currently a substantial carbon sink globally. Many climate change mitigation strategies leverage forest preservation and expansion, but rely on forests storing carbon for decades to centuries. Yet climate‐driven disturbances pose critical risks to the long‐term stability of forest carbon. We quantify the climate drivers that influence wildfire and climate stress‐driven tree mortality, including a separate insect‐dr...

Carbon offsets are widely used by individuals, corporations, and governments to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions on the assumption that offsets reflect equivalent climate benefits achieved elsewhere. These climate‐equivalence claims depend on offsets providing real and additional climate benefits beyond what would have happened, counterfactually, without the offsets project. Here, we evaluate the design of California's...

For most of the scientific disciplines associated with coastal and estuarine research, workforce representation does not match the demographics of communities we serve, especially for Black, Hispanic or Latino, and Indigenous peoples. This essay provides an overview of this inequity and identifies how a scientific society can catalyze representational, structural, and interactional diversity to achieve greater inclusion. Neede...

The utility of plant functional traits for predictive ecology relies on our ability to interpret trait variation across multiple taxonomic and ecological scales. Using extensive data sets of trait variation within species, across species and across communities, we analysed whether and at what scales leaf economics spectrum ( LES ) traits show predicted trait–trait covariation. We found that most variation in LES traits is ofte...

In this paper we review the evidence for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH), which proposes that at ∼12.9k cal a BP North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East were subjected to some sort of extraterrestrial event. This purported event is proposed as a catastrophic process responsible for: terminal Pleistocene environmental changes (onset of YD cooling, continent‐scale wildfires); extinction of late Pleist...

A bstract Sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) and beaked whales ( Mesoplodon spp. and Ziphius cavirostris ) are deep‐diving cetaceans that frequent shelf‐edge and Gulf Stream waters off the northeast U. S. coast. Sighting data collected during seven summer (1990, 1991, 1993, and 1995–1998) shipboard surveys were analyzed using a geographic information system to determine habitat use based on bathymetric and oceanographic f...