The western US has experienced widespread increases in burned area in recent decades (Keeley and Syphard 2018; Bowman et al., 2020). In California and Oregon the largest and most destructive wildfires on record have occurred in just the last few years. The western US has simultaneously been experiencing a megadrought, exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change… More
Climate extremes such as heat waves and droughts are projected to occur more Frequently with increasing temperature and an intensified hydrological cycle. It is Important to understand and quantify how forest carbon fluxes respond to heat and drought stress. In this study, we developed a series of daily indices of sensitivity to heat and drought… More
Temperature is a primary environmental control on ecological systems and processes at a range of spatial and temporal scales. The surface temperature of organisms is often more relevant for ecological processes than air temperature, which is much more commonly measured. Surface temperature influences—and is influenced by—a range of biological, physical, and chemical processes, providing a… More
Canopy temperature Tcan is a key driver of plant function that emerges as a result of interacting biotic and abiotic processes and properties. However, understanding controls on Tcan and forecasting canopy responses to weather extremes and climate change are difficult due to sparse measurements of Tcan at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Burgeoning observations of… More
Large datasets of greenhouse gas and energy surface-atmosphere fluxes measured with the eddy-covariance technique (e.g., FLUXNET2015, AmeriFlux BASE) are widely used to benchmark models and remote-sensing products. This study addresses one of the major challenges facing model-data integration: To what spatial extent do flux measurements taken at individual eddy-covariance sites reflect model- or satellite-based grid… More
Forest carbon sequestration via forest preservation can be a viable climate change mitigation strategy. We identify forests in the western conterminous United States with high potential carbon sequestration and low vulnerability to future drought and fire, as simulated using the Community Land Model and two high carbon emission scenario (RCP 8.5) climate models. High-productivity, low-vulnerability… More