Climate change reduces resilience to fire in subalpine rainforests

High resilience of tropical rainforests to climate change

Fire, climate change, and forest resilience in interior Alaska1

In the boreal forests of interior Alaska, feedbacks that link forest soils, fire characteristics, and plant traits have supported stable cycles of forest succession for the past 6000 years. This high resilience of forest stands to fire disturbance is supported by two interrelated feedback cycles: (i) interactions among disturbance regime and plant–soil–microbial feedbacks that regulate soil org...

Fire, Fuel Composition and Resilience Threshold in Subalpine Ecosystem

BACKGROUND Forecasting the effects of global changes on high altitude ecosystems requires an understanding of the long-term relationships between biota and forcing factors to identify resilience thresholds. Fire is a crucial forcing factor: both fuel build-up from land-abandonment in European mountains, and more droughts linked to global warming are likely to increase fire risks. METHODS To a...

Climate change in Australian tropical rainforests: an impending environmental catastrophe.

It is now widely accepted that global climate change is affecting many ecosystems around the globe and that its impact is increasing rapidly. Many studies predict that impacts will consist largely of shifts in latitudinal and altitudinal distributions. However, we demonstrate that the impacts of global climate change in the tropical rainforests of northeastern Australia have the potential to re...

Opal Waters, Rising Seas: How Sociocultural Inequality Reduces Resilience to Climate Change among Indigenous Australians

W continental ice sheets melted about 15,000 years ago, rising seas inundated large regions of northern Australia, fl ooding valleys and creating vast, low-lying wetland areas. More recent transitions in some of these regions occurred as gradual siltation and levée formation reduced the movement of salt water to create freshwater swamps that were regularly fi lled by monsoon rains, a process th...