Presentation from the 2020 annual meeting of
the Ecological Society of America (ESA), which took place online August 3-6,
2020.
Click the link above to view the recording of
this presentation.
Reforestation
or Reorganization? How Landscape Context and Climate Can Inform Post-Fire
Decision-Making
Jonathan Coop, Western Colorado
University
Collin Haffey, The Nature Conservancy
Jens Stevens, U.S. Geological Survey
Kyle Rodman, University of Wisconsin,
Madison
Background/Question/Methods
Changing fire regimes and climate can
surmount forest resilience, driving long-term conversion to alternate and
non-forested states. These changes compel a management framework that
accommodates a broad range of possible ecological outcomes. However, the
development and application of such a framework is curbed by knowledge gaps and
uncertainties—what can we do?—in addition to the lack of a clear social or ethical
mandate—what should we do? Across the eastern Jemez Mountains of northern New
Mexico, a series of extreme wildfires, including the 60,000-ha Las Conchas fire
in 2011, provide a case study in fire-driven ecological reorganization. Our
objective here is to advance a management framework for fire-driven change in
this landscape. We draw on recent and ongoing research on fire-vegetation
dynamics in this region to address key knowledge gaps, account for irreducible
uncertainties, and plan reforestation that fosters ecological understanding and
supports community values. In particular, we focus on how fire refugia and
climate can provide a template for management interventions, or lack thereof.
Results/Conclusions
A
modern framework for forest management necessarily includes strategies for 1)
sustaining contemporary forest systems through interventions that enhance
disturbance resistance and post-disturbance recovery mechanisms, but also 2)
accommodating ecological reorganization through non-intervention or by inducing
shifts toward desired alternate outcomes. Ecological research in dry conifer
forests has emphasized sustaining forests; however, where high-severity fire
has already occurred, the science and management of ecological reorganization
are less well developed. As a template for both research and management, we
first developed a high-resolution map of forested refugia within the Las
Conchas footprint, finding that >50% of this landscape is now > 50 m from
tree seed sources. We next employed this map, climate surfaces, and
empirically-derived predictors of tree regeneration to model the likelihood of
natural forest recovery and identify suitable areas for tree planting. Third,
reforestation efforts were designed to support multi-scale compositional and
landscape heterogeneity, allowing for functioning non-forest patches and
facilitating expected climate-associated shifts of key tree species. However, a
suite of persistent knowledge gaps remain, some of which can only be filled via
trial and error, demanding that management interventions employ a rigorous
experimental design. As such, reforestation is planned to simultaneously
maximize two functions: climate-smart and landscape context-dependent
reforestation aligned with community values, and co-produced, applied
ecological knowledge critical to adaptive management for an era of change.
