Craig D. Allen (U.S. Geological Survey, Jemez Mountains Field Station, Los Alamos, NM)
Abstract. Climate variability and land use are key drivers of interrelated changes in ecosystem patterns and disturbance processes, including broad-scale tree mortality, fire regimes, and ecohydrological runoff and erosion dynamics. Pervasive ecosystem changes have occurred over the past century in montane landscapes of the southwestern USA, with forest die-off and severe fire activity affecting millions of hectares since the late 1990s, a period including severe drought and unusual warmth. Current and historic patterns of vegetation change, forest die-off (and associated insect outbreaks), fire activity, and runoff and erosion dynamics are described for the Southwest (particularly the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico) to illustrate nonlinear threshold responses to climate and land use stressors. In addition, a recent global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality (Allen et al., 2010, Forest Ecology and Management 259:660–684) highlights the central role of thresholds in processes at fine spatial scales to drive tipping points in tree mortality that can propagate at landscape and even sub-continental scales. These climate-driven increases in both chronic background tree mortality rates and episodes of rapid, broad-scale forest mortality are linked to thresholds in tree physiological stress responses, sometimes amplified by epidemic dynamics of associated biotic agents (e.g., bark beetles in western North America). Methods for these results include dendrochronological reconstructions of tree demographies and fire regimes, dendrometer measurements of pine tree-growth since 1991 and associated tree-ring studies of stable carbon isotopes, monitoring of herbaceous vegetation along 3 km of permanent transects since 1991, photographic and remote-sensing interpretation of forest die-off and fire activity, intensive storm-event-resolution measurements of runoff and erosion at multiple spatial scales from a 1.09 ha watershed since 1993, and ongoing research on the patterns and processes of climate-driven tree mortality. Interactive feedbacks among these disturbance processes can drive further nonlinear ecosystem tipping points. For example, forest die-off changes fuel conditions that can induce nonlinear increases in the probability and severity of fire activity, which then can drive reductions in surface cover of plant materials below critical threshold values which trigger nonlinear increases in erosion rates. These examples indicate the potential for abrupt broad-scale ecosystem state changes of forest and semiarid ecosystems from ongoing global change stressors.