COVID-19 pandemic impacts on conservation research, management, and public engagement in US national parks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the timing and substance of conservation research, management, and public engagement in protected areas around the world. This disruption is evident in US national parks, which play a key role in protecting natural and cultural resources and providing outdoor experiences for the public. Collectively, US national parks protect 34 million ha, host more than 300 million visits annually, and serve as one of the world's largest informal education organizations.

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) assisted migration potential: testing establishment north of the species range.

The translocation of species into habitable locations outside of their current ranges, termed assisted migration, has been proposed as a means of saving vulnerable species from extinction as a result of climate change. We explore the use of this controversial technique using a threatened keystone species in western North America, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), as a case study. Species distribution models predict that whitebark pine will be extirpated from most of its current range as temperatures rise over the next 70 years.

Modeling lodgepole pine radial growth relative to climate and genetics using universal growth-trend response functions.

Forests strongly affect Earth's carbon cycles, making our ability to forecast forest-productivity changes associated with rising temperatures and changes in precipitation increasingly critical. In this study, we model the influence of climate on annual radial growth using lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) trees grown for 34 years in a large provenance experiment in western Canada. We use a random-coefficient modeling approach to build universal growth-trend response functions that simultaneously incorporate the impacts of different provenance and site climates on radial growth trends under present and future annual (growth-year), summer, and winter climate regimes.