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--></style><title>Which US forests most at risk from
drought?</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><i>Global Change Biology </i>
August 2016</font><font face="Arial"><br>
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<b>US forest response to projected climate-related stress: a tolerance
perspective</b></font><font face="Arial"><br>
</font><font face="Lucida Grande">Jean Liénard, John
Harrison,Nikolay Strigul</font><font face="Arial"><br>
</font><font face="Lucida Grande">Washington State University
Vancouver, Vancouver, WA, USA</font><font face="Arial"><br>
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</font><font face="Lucida Grande">"Vulnerable areas include
mostly the Midwest United States and Northeast United States, as well
as high-elevation areas of the Rocky Mountains. We also infer stress
incurred by shifting climate should create an opening for the
establishment of forest types not currently seen in the conterminous
United States."</font><font face="Arial"><br>
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Abstract</font><font face="Arial"><br>
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face="Lucida Grande"><u
>http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13291/full</u></font><br
>
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<div><font face="Lucida Grande">Although it is widely recognized that
climate change will require a major spatial reorganization of forests,
our ability to predict exactly how and where forest characteristics
and distributions will change has been rather limited. Current efforts
to predict future distribution of forested ecosystems as a function of
climate include species distribution models (for fine-scale
predictions) and potential vegetation climate envelope models (for
coarse-grained, large-scale predictions). Here, we develop and apply
an intermediate approach wherein we use stand-level tolerances of
environmental stressors to understand forest distributions and
vulnerabilities to anticipated climate change. In contrast to other
existing models, this approach can be applied at a continental scale
while maintaining a direct link to ecologically relevant,
climate-related stressors. We first demonstrate that shade, drought,
and waterlogging tolerances of forest stands are strongly correlated
with climate and edaphic conditions in the conterminous United States.
This discovery allows the development of a tolerance distribution
model (TDM), a novel quantitative tool to assess landscape level
impacts of climate change. We then focus on evaluating the
implications of the drought TDM. Using an ensemble of 17 climate
change models to drive this TDM, we estimate that 18% of US ecosystems
are vulnerable to drought-related stress over the coming century.
Vulnerable areas include mostly the Midwest United States and
Northeast United States, as well as high-elevation areas of the Rocky
Mountains. We also infer stress incurred by shifting climate should
create an opening for the establishment of forest types not currently
seen in the conterminous United States.</font></div>
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"Full of recent references and statistics,<i> Harvesting the
Biosphere</i> adds to the growing chorus of warnings about the current
trajectory of human activity on a finite planet, of which climate
change is only one dimension. One can quibble with some assumptions or
tweak Smil's calculations, but the bottom line will not change, only
the time it may take humanity to reach a crisis point."<br>
<br>
Stephen Running. "Approaching the Limits"<i> Science</i> 15 March
2013.<br>
<br>
<b>Book review.</b><i> Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken
from Nature.</i> by Vaclav Smil . MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
2012. 315 pp. $29, £19.95. ISBN 9780262018562.<br>
<br>
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