Drought-tolerant limber pine may lead climate-driven treeline advance in the southern Rocky Mtns скачать в хорошем качестве

Drought-tolerant limber pine may lead climate-driven treeline advance in the southern Rocky Mtns

Presenter: Laurel Sindewald Title: Drought-tolerant limber pine may lead climate-driven treeline advance in the southern Rocky Mountains Speaker Bio: Laurel Sindewald is an ORISE postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. She is currently using the large fire simulator (FSim) and the forest vegetation simulator (FVS) to estimate smoke and emissions tradeoffs between prescribed fire management scenarios in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Laurel earned her PhD in Integrative and Systems Biology at University of Colorado Denver in Diana Tomback's Forest Ecology lab, studying limber pine at treeline in Rocky Mountain National Park. Webinar Blurb: Limber pine (Pinus flexilis) is a stress- and drought-tolerant, five-needle white pine with a broad elevational distribution. Bioclimatic envelope models predict that limber pine's distribution will shift to higher elevations in Rocky Mountain National Park with climate warming, while its distribution at lower elevations will shrink. Limber pine has already been seen to be leapfrogging great basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the White Mountains of California. We surveyed limber pine regeneration in the alpine treeline ecotone in Rocky Mountain National Park—the transitional zone between the upper extent of upright tree growth, timberline, and the upper limit of tree occurrence—to assess whether limber pine recruitment supports the hypothesis that limber pine will move to higher elevations with changing climate. Given limber pine's relatedness to whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and their morphological similarities, we also estimated the frequency of limber pine's occurrence as a solitary tree and as a tree island initiator; whitebark pine has been found to establish as a solitary tree (without shelter from other conifers) and to facilitate the establishment of seedlings downwind more often than other species, leading to tree island formation and treeline advance. We aimed to determine 1) whether limber pine may advance to higher elevations with climate change and 2) whether limber pine facilitates the establishment of other conifers. Our research informs predictions about treeline response to climate change in the southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the likely future distribution and persistence of an ecologically important species of conservation concern.