Abstract
Populations of pinons and junipers across the interior west have been highly dynamic over the last two centuries, undergoing an overall expansion but punctuated with regional mortality. Accumulating demographic studies across the interior west indicate the drivers of expansion and contraction of populations are compounded by regional land use legacies, but have an underlying climatic component. The key implication is that pinon and juniper distributions respond to climatic variation across spatial and temporal scales by expansion from, and contraction to, areas of long-term persistence relative to their centurial (pinons) and millennial (junipers) life spans. Individualistic climatic tolerances among piñon and juniper species lead to temporally dynamic assemblages in the landscape that vary regionally.
Parent Publication
Keywords
statistics,
estimation,
sampling,
modeling,
remote sensing,
forest health,
data integrity,
environmental monitoring,
cover estimation,
international forest monitoring
Citation
Gibson, Jacob; Moisen, Gretchen G.; Frescino, Tracey S.; Edwards, Thomas C. Jr. 2012. Expansion and contraction tension zones in western pinon-juniper woodlands under projected climate change. In: Morin, Randall S.; Liknes, Greg C., comps. Moving from status to trends: Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) symposium 2012; 2012 December 4-6; Baltimore, MD. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-105. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. [CD-ROM]: 115-118.
