CAREER: Mechanisms of ecological and fire regime change in temperate maritime forests: disturbance, heterogeneity, and resilience

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The first two decades of the 21st century have been characterized by increasing forest disturbance. Accelerating wildfire activity is of pressing concern in many temperate and boreal forest regions; its frequency is particularly sensitive to climate change. Shifting patterns of wildfire, along with stressful post-fire environmental conditions, can erode resilience and catalyze ecosystem collapse. This CAREER project will test hypotheses of how disturbance and forest ecosystem structure interact to affect ecological resilience. Through integrated research, education, and training activities, the project will enable improved forecasting of forest ecosystem fate during an era of warming climate and accelerating wildfire activity. By integrating scientific goals of this project into multiple classroom teaching activities and bringing undergraduate scholars into the research team from a wide diversity of backgrounds, this project will also broaden societal dialogue around inclusive and equitable management of fire-prone ecosystems and empower early-career researchers in fire ecology. This NSF CAREER project will integrate remotely sensed data and analyses of forest structure and wildfire patterns with new field measurements in an established and expanding network of permanent plots located in recently burned forests to test mechanisms of ecological and fire regime change. This work will be focused on temperate maritime forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where biologically- and carbon-rich ecosystems are shaped by infrequent and severe wildfires in ways that are not currently well understood by the scientific community. Two primary research questions will be addressed: (1) How does heterogeneity in forest landscape structure interact reciprocally with heterogeneity in wildfire disturbances? (2) How does heterogeneity in post-fire landscape structure affect key mechanisms of forest resilience to fire and drivers of fire regime change? These questions will be approached using a combination of new and existing remotely sensed geospatial data on forest structure, wildfire patterns, and meteorological conditions across multiple scales. Together, these approaches will test multiple hypotheses about how disturbances and heterogeneity affect resilience mechanisms, and will provide key insights into how resilience will unfold in ecosystems characterized by infrequent and severe fire regimes in a warming and more fire-prone world. This project will catalyze inquiry-driven learning through new modules that are linked to data collected via research activities, and broaden perspectives around fire ecology and management through guest speakers in undergraduate and graduate courses. Additionally, the project will support student-centered mentorship of early-career graduate students and undergraduate as core members of the research team. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.