Publications Published in PLoS ONE

1. Climate Change and the Future of California's Endemic Flora. Scott R. Loariel; Benjamin E. Carter; Katherine Hayhoe; Sean McMahon; Richard Moe; Charles A. Knight; David D. Ackerly.
   PLoS ONE: 2008
   Notes
   The flora of California, a global biodiversity hotspot, includes 2387 endemic plant taxa. With anticipated climate change, we project that up to 66% will experience .80% reductions in range size within a century. These results are comparable with other studies of fewer species or just samples of a region’s endemics. Projected reductions depend on the magnitude of future emissions and on the ability of species to disperse from their current locations. California’s varied terrain could cause species to move in very different directions, breaking up present-day floras. However, our projections also identify regions where species undergoing severe range reductions may persist. Protecting these potential future refugia and facilitating species dispersal will be essential to maintain biodiversity in the face of climate change.
   
   
   
2. Global pyrogeography: the current and future distribution of wildfire. Krawchuk, MA; Moritz, MA; Parisien, M-A; Van Dorn, J; Hayhoe K.
   PLoS ONE: 2009
   DOI: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005102
   Notes
   Climate change is expected to alter the geographic distribution of wildfire, a complex abiotic process that responds to a variety of spatial and environmental gradients. How future climate change may alter global wildfire activity, however, is still largely unknown. As a first step to quantifying potential change in global wildfire, we present a multivariate quantification of environmental drivers for the observed, current distribution of vegetation fires using statistical models of the relationship between fire activity and resources to burn, climate conditions, human influence, and lightning flash rates at a coarse spatiotemporal resolution (100 km, over one decade). We then demonstrate how these statistical models can be used to project future changes in global fire patterns, highlighting regional hotspots of change in fire probabilities under future climate conditions as simulated by a global climate model. Based on current conditions, our results illustrate how the availability of resources to burn and c mate conditions conducive to combustion jointly determine why some parts of the world are fire-prone and others are fire-free. In contrast to any expectation that global warming should necessarily result in more fire, we find that regional increases in fire probabilities may be counter-balanced by decreases at other locations, due to the interplay of temperature and precipitation variables. Despite this net balance, our models predict substantial invasion and retreat of fire across large portions of the globe. These changes could have important effects on terrestrial ecosystems since alteration in fire activity may occur quite rapidly, generating ever more complex environmental challenges for species dispersing and adjusting to new climate conditions. Our findings highlight the potential for widespread impacts of climate change on wildfire, suggesting severely altered fire regimes and the need for more explicit inclusion of fire in research on global vegetation-climate change dynamics and conservation planning.