Donald Falk - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Donald Falk

Ecological Restoration, 1996

research. W the National Science Foundation initiated the Special Program in Conservation and Res... more research. W the National Science Foundation initiated the Special Program in Conservation and Restoration Biology (CRB) in 1989, restorationists saw it as a milestone in the coming age of restoration. Most previous research in restoration had been funded privately or, where state and federal funds were involved, was more often for the utilitarian purposes of reclamation or rehabilitation. This was the first time restoration was treated as a legitimate area for basic research. The CRB Program seemed like a move that would help improve the quality of restoration research and promote increased participation by academic researchers. However, the results of the program have been disappointing. Out of some 15 proposals funded each year, on average only one or two were restoration proposals. This reflected the small proportion of restoration proposals submitted and raises the question of why so few researchers chose to submit restoration-oriented proposals. In contrast, the program has been enormously successful for conservation researchers, who submitted the bulk of the funded proposals. Conservation genetics and population-level conservation research have made great strides in both basic and applied research since 1989, and have become part of mainstream research in population ecology and genetics. Partly for this reason, future proposals in this area are likely to be well received by reviewers and panelists engaged in mainstream genetics and population biology research. In fact, "mainstreaming" is the intent of special programs at NSF, the idea being to promote areas that have previously been neglected, raising them to the status of traditional research areas. Special programs at NSF are designed to last some four years, but after seven years of the CRB Program restoration research has still not become part of ecological mainstream research, and has progressed little in conceptual development. To help change this trend in restoration research, we organized a workshop on "Developing the Conceptual Basis for Restoration Biology." We consulted with Scott Collins, a CRB program officer, on the approaches and results that would be most useful for NSF. There are social, political and economic limitations to restoration, but NSF can help only in the area of scientific limitations so we focused our workshop on the scientific aspects of restoration. We all felt that one of the reasons so few ecologists chose to submit proposals is that restoration is still viewed as a discipline without the conceptual basis needed to support basic research. Michael Soule and Kathryn Kohm’s book, Research Priorities for Conservation Biology (1989), helped to develop the conceptual basis for conservation biology, but a similar approach has never been taken for restoration. While Soule and Kohm discussed restoration, they presented it as a job for land managers, and not a scientific discipline. They also downplayed the importance of restoration for conservation, arguing that

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2019

Fire History Analysis and Exploration System

Variation in Earth’s climate system has always been a primary driver of ecosystem processes and b... more Variation in Earth’s climate system has always been a primary driver of ecosystem processes and biological evolution. In recent decades, however, the prospect of anthropogenically driven change to the climate system has become an increasingly dominant concern for scientists and conservation biologists. Understanding how ecosystems may adapt to rapid contemporary and future change benefits from our knowledge of how they have responded to natural climatic variation across prehistoric time, especially during periods when Earth system conditions and ecosystems correspond to those of the modern era (e.g., Quaternary, the past 2.5 million years). Despite the dominant and pervasive influence of both climate variability and climate change, the restoration field is still learning how to accommodate these emerging influences. In this chapter we explore the consequences of climate variability and change for the science of restoration ecology and the practice of ecological restoration.

Beginning in 2007 in and around the Huachuca Mountains, the Coronado National Forest and other pa... more Beginning in 2007 in and around the Huachuca Mountains, the Coronado National Forest and other partners have been mapping ecosystems at multiple scales. The approach has focused on identifying land type associations (LTA), which represent the sum of bedrock and superficial geology, topography, elevation, potential and existing vegetation, soil properties, and local climatic variables. This mapping effort has been extended into the FireScape program, in which multiple partners utilize ecological land type mapping as a framework for fire planning across the Sky Island bioregion. Land type association maps for the Catalina-Rincon mountains (available at www.azfirescape.org) are used for managing ecological units (e.g., mixed conifer on granitic soils) typically no smaller than a thousand acres, and often much larger. Land type associations compliment raster-based sources of information such as LANDFIRE. Not surprisingly, the success of the project depends on an accurate depiction of ve...

Foundations of Restoration Ecology, 2016

... play an important role in the manage-ment of germplasm resources and restoration ecology by d... more ... play an important role in the manage-ment of germplasm resources and restoration ecology by determining the heritable compo-nent of ecologically important traits such as growth rates and tolerance for drought or ex-treme temperatures (Mitchell-Olds 1995; van Tienderen et ...

Restoration Ecology, 2021

Restoration Ecology, 2018

Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 2018

Dry mixed-conifer forests are widespread in the interior Pacific Northwest, but their historical ... more Dry mixed-conifer forests are widespread in the interior Pacific Northwest, but their historical fire regimes are poorly characterized, in particular the relative mix of low- and high-severity fire. We reconstructed a multi-century history of fire from tree rings in dry mixed-conifer forests in central Oregon. These forests are dominated by ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), and grand fir (Abies grandis (Douglas ex D. Don) Lindl.). Across four, 30-plot grids of ∼800 ha covering a mosaic of dry mixed-conifer forest types, we sampled 4065 trees for evidence of both high- and low-severity fire. From 1650 to ∼1900, all four sites sustained frequent, often extensive, low-severity fires that sometimes included small patches of severe fire (50–150 ha during 18%–28% of fire years). Fire intervals were similar among sites and also among forest types within sites (mean intervals of 14–32 years). To characterize the continuo...

Better understanding and prediction of tree growth is important because of the many ecosystem ser... more Better understanding and prediction of tree growth is important because of the many ecosystem services provided by forests and the uncertainty surrounding how forests will respond to anthropogenic climate change. With the ultimate goal of improving models of forest dynamics, here we construct a statistical model that combines complementary data sources – tree-ring and forest inventory data. A Bayesian hierarchical model is used to gain inference on the effects of many factors on tree growth – individual tree size, climate, biophysical conditions, stand-level competitive environment, tree-level canopy status, and forest management treatments – using both diameter at breast height (DBH) and tree-ring data. The model consists of two multiple regression models, one each for the two data sources, linked via a constant of proportionality between coefficients that are found in parallel in the two regressions. The model was applied to a dataset developed at a single, well-studied site in th...

Genetics and conservation …, 1991

8 A Comparison of Methods for Assessing Genetic Variation in Plant Conservation Biology BARBARA A... more 8 A Comparison of Methods for Assessing Genetic Variation in Plant Conservation Biology BARBARA A. SCHAAL, WESLEY J. LEVERICH, and ... The classic studies of Clausen et al.(1948) on Achillea lanulosa ecotypes show that the morphological differences of ecotypes are ...

Forest death from extreme drought and wildfires are reducing regional carbon reservoirs and overa... more Forest death from extreme drought and wildfires are reducing regional carbon reservoirs and overall forest sequestration capacity. At the same time, land use practices and development have increased the vulnerabil- ity of some forests during extreme droughts. The intent of this fact sheet is to explain the basics of the car- bon cycle in southwestern forests. It also summarizes how carbon cycling patterns are most likely to change in the coming years to decades in the Southwest.