Members of the Safford lab are heavily involved in documenting trends in vegetation and disturbances like fire and insect outbreaks, and their interactions with climate and management over the last century in North American Mediterranean Climate Zone (NAMCZ, largely California).
Examples include changing fire regimes and their connection to management and climate (Safford et al. 2008, Miller et al. 2009, Miller et al. 2012, Miller and Safford 2012, Steel et al. 2015, Restaino and Safford 2018); trends in fire frequency and their variation in space and time (Van de Water and Safford 2011, Safford and Van de Water 2014); trends in forest structure and composition and their relationship to changing climate and landuse (Dolanc et al. 2013a, 2014); trends in the geometry of fire severity patches and impacts on wildlife habitat (Steel et al. 2018, 2019); effects of fire on lichen diversity (Miller et al. 2018), plant diversity (DeSiervo et al. 2015, Richter et al. 2019, Miller and Safford 2020), and animal diversity (White et al. 2015, Dalrymple et al. 2019, Steel et al. 2019); and environmental trends and their effects on fire, vegetation, and management (Safford et al. 2012a,b; Safford and Vallejo 2019, Safford et al. 2021).
We recently published a book-length summary of historical, current, and potential future conditions in yellow pine-mixed conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada (Safford and Stevens 2015). Members of the lab were important contributors to a recent BioScience summary of the relationships between the massive recent wave of insect-driven mortality in the Sierra Nevada and potential future fire patterns and Becky Wayman recently led a field study looking into how tree mortality affects fire severity (Wayman and Safford 2021). At higher elevation, Sarah Winsemius is leading a study that is examining the effects of disturbance and increased precipitation variability on carbon and water resources in subalpine forests in the Sierra Nevada.
One of our most important initiatives has been to inventory postfire regeneration of tree species in dozens of fires around the NAMCZ – in both naturally regenerated and planted settings – and to use these inventories and subsequent monitoring to develop tools that managers can use to better plan where and when to conduct supplemental planting, as well as what to plant. This work has resulted in a number of publications and tools (Welch et al. 2016; Shive et al. 2017; Young et al. 2019, 2020; Stewart et al. 2021, Weeks study in progress), most notably the POSCRPT tool for projecting conifer regeneration after fire. In a similar vein we have helped to develop broad strategies for restoring ecosystems after disturbance in the NAMCZ (Underwood et al. 2018b, North et al. 2019, Meyer et al. 2021).
Together with the Forest Service Region 5 Regional Ecology Program staff, current and ex-members of the lab recently helped to complete assessments of the natural range of variation (NRV) for major terrestrial ecosystem types in the Sierra Nevada and northwestern California. These documents review historical patterns in ecological function, structure, and composition, compare them to current conditions, and summarize future projections where available. These assessments are fundamental building blocks for the new National Forest plans being developed in California, as well as other scientific and management priorities. Safford and Stevens (2015) covers yellow pine and mixed conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada and adjacent forest regions, and Bohlman et al. (2021) extends the analysis to northwestern California, and an NRV assessment of southern California montane forests is in progress.
Safford Lab is really productive in terms of publications in scientific journals. In the following link you can consult the main publications and in the CV of the lab members the complete list of publications. If you need something specific, do not hesitate to contact us.
