Bark beetle impacts on forest evapotranspiration and its partitioning.

Insect outbreaks affect forest structure and function and represent a major category of forest disturbance globally. However, the resulting impacts on evapotranspiration (ET), and especially hydrological partitioning between the abiotic (evaporation) and biotic (transpiration) components of total ET, are not well constrained. As a result, we combined remote sensing, eddy covariance, and hydrological modeling approaches to determine the effects of bark beetle outbreak on ET and its partitioning at multiple scales throughout the Southern Rocky Mountain Ecoregion (SRME), USA.

Impacts of bark beetle-induced tree mortality on pyrogenic carbon production and heat output in wildfires for fire modeling and global carbon accounting.

Forests store significant quantities of carbon, and accurate quantification of the fate of this carbon after fire is necessary for global carbon accounting. Pyrogenic carbon (PyC) encompasses various carbonaceous products of incomplete combustion formed during fires and has potential to act as a carbon sink for up to millennia, but current estimates of PyC production in wildfires vary widely. Northern hardwood forests have changed dramatically in recent decades due to insect epidemics, such as the bark beetle epidemic in the Rocky Mountain Region which has caused widespread mortality.

Hydraulic and photosynthetic responses of big sagebrush to the 2017 total solar eclipse.

The total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 created a path of totality ~115 km in width across the United States. While eclipse observations have shown distinct responses in animal behavior often emulating nocturnal behavior, the influence of eclipses on plant physiology are less understood. We investigated physiological perturbations due to rapid changes of sunlight and air temperature in big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp.

Plant water use responses along secondary forest succession during the 2015-2016 El Niño drought in Panama.

Tropical forests are increasingly being subjected to hotter, drier conditions as a result of global climate change. The effects of drought on forests along successional gradients remain poorly understood. We took advantage of the 2015-2016 El Niño event to test for differences in drought response along a successional gradient by measuring the sap flow in 76 trees, representing 42 different species, in 8-, 25- and 80-yr-old secondary forests in the 15-km 'Agua Salud Project' study area, located in central Panama.