Postfire futures in southwestern forests: Climate and landscape influences on trajectories of recovery and conversion.

ABSTRACT: Southwestern ponderosa pine forests are vulnerable to fire-driven conversion in a warming and drying climate, yet little is known about what kinds of ecological communities may replace them. To characterize postfire vegetation trajectories and their environmental determinants, plant assemblages (361 sample plots including 229 vascular plant species, surveyed in 2017) were sampled within eight burns that occurred between 2000 and 2003. I used nonmetric multidimensional scaling, k-means clustering, principal component analysis, and random forest models to assess relationships between vegetation pattern, topographic and landscape factors, and gridded climate data. I describe seven postfire community types, including regenerating forests of ponderosa pine, aspen, and mixed conifers, shrub-domi

SUBMITTER: Coop JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10078526 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature