skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Southwestern Pine Forests Likely to Disappear

Abstract

A new study, led by Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nathan McDowell, suggests that widespread loss of a major forest type, the pine-juniper woodlands of the Southwestern U.S., could be wiped out by the end of this century due to climate change, and that conifers throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere may be on a similar trajectory. New results, reported in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that global models may underestimate predictions of forest death. McDowell and his large international team strove to provide the missing pieces of understanding tree death at three levels: plant, regional and global. The team rigorously developed and evaluated multiple process-based and empirical models against experimental results, and then compared these models to results from global vegetation models to examine independent simulations. They discovered that the global models simulated mortality throughout the Northern Hemisphere that was of similar magnitude, but much broader spatial scale, as the evaluated ecosystem models predicted for in the Southwest.

Authors:
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE
OSTI Identifier:
1259707
Resource Type:
Multimedia
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY; DROUGHTS; FOREST MORTALITY; CLIMATE FORECAST; SOUTHWEST

Citation Formats

McDowell, Nathan. Southwestern Pine Forests Likely to Disappear. United States: N. p., 2015. Web.
McDowell, Nathan. Southwestern Pine Forests Likely to Disappear. United States.
McDowell, Nathan. 2015. "Southwestern Pine Forests Likely to Disappear". United States. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1259707.
@article{osti_1259707,
title = {Southwestern Pine Forests Likely to Disappear},
author = {McDowell, Nathan},
abstractNote = {A new study, led by Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nathan McDowell, suggests that widespread loss of a major forest type, the pine-juniper woodlands of the Southwestern U.S., could be wiped out by the end of this century due to climate change, and that conifers throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere may be on a similar trajectory. New results, reported in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that global models may underestimate predictions of forest death. McDowell and his large international team strove to provide the missing pieces of understanding tree death at three levels: plant, regional and global. The team rigorously developed and evaluated multiple process-based and empirical models against experimental results, and then compared these models to results from global vegetation models to examine independent simulations. They discovered that the global models simulated mortality throughout the Northern Hemisphere that was of similar magnitude, but much broader spatial scale, as the evaluated ecosystem models predicted for in the Southwest.},
doi = {},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1259707}, journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Dec 21 00:00:00 EST 2015},
month = {Mon Dec 21 00:00:00 EST 2015}
}