99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

OOS 7

Understanding Climate, Disturbance, and Forest Dynamics from Regional to Individual Tree Scales in the Sierra Nevada

Changing climate and a legacy of past land-use interactively influence forest dynamics. Climatic influences on wildfire and forest productivity have the potential to alter forest distribution, composition, structure, and function at regional to individual tree spatial scales. Changes in disturbance regimes and forest productivity alter the biophysical and biogeochemical properties of forest systems, which in turn can feedback on climate. Understanding the relationship between climate, disturbance, and forest dynamics requires regional to individual tree scale investigation to capture both top-down and bottom-up effects. Furthermore, understanding these relations at multiple spatial scales is important to understand how current and future forest management will impact forest dynamics and climate feedbacks going forward. The goal of this session is to present research on the effects of climate and ecosystem processes on forest systems across multiple spatial scales. This session will include speakers who use a range of approaches (e.g. empirical studies, statistical and simulation modeling) to investigate how climate, disturbance, and management influence forest dynamics. This session will provide a venue for examining the range of approaches and questions asked as they pertain to forest systems. The anticipated structure of the session includes regional simulations of climate effects on fire probability, regional simulations of climate effects on forest productivity and its interaction with insects and fire, stand to regional scale effects of the interaction between fire and forest restoration efforts, stand-scale above and belowground carbon dynamics with fire, and climate effects on species-level productivity and regeneration. This session will be of interest to a broad range of ecologists working in forest systems, as the research topics covered are relevant to many forest types. Furthermore, many of the speakers will present cutting-edge work that is dealing with the scale disparity present when investigating both top-down and bottom-up controls on forest dynamics.