Wildfires in boreal forests release large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change. Here, we characterize the magnitude of recent and projected gross and net boreal North American wildfire carbon dioxide emissions, evaluate fire management as an emissions reduction strategy, and quantify the associated costs. Our results show that wildfires in boreal North America could, by mid-century, contribute to a cumulative net source of nearly 12 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, about 3% of remaining global carbon dioxide emissions associated with keeping temperatures within the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. With observations from Alaska, we show that current fire management practices limit the burned area. Further, the costs of avoiding carbon dioxide emissions by means of increasing investment in fire management are comparable to or lower than those of other mitigation strategies. Together, our findings highlight the climate risk that boreal wildfires pose and point to fire management as a cost-effective way to limit emissions.
Aim: Amphibian populations are threatened globally by anthropogenic change and Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a fungal pathogen causing chytridiomycosis disease to varying degrees of severity. A closely related new fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), has recently left its supposed native range in Asia and decimated some salamander populations in Europe. Despite being noticed initially for causing chytridiomycosis-related population declines in salamanders, Bsal can also infect anurans and cause non-lethal chytridiomycosis or asymptomatic infections in salamanders. Bsal has not yet been detected in the United States, but given the United States has the highest salamander biodiversity on Earth, predictive assessments of salamander risk to Bsal infection will enable proactive allocation of research and conservation efforts into disease prevention and mitigation. Location: The United States, Europe and Asia. Methods: We first predicted the environmental suitability for the Bsal pathogen in the United States through an ecological niche model based on the pathogen's known native range in Asia, validated on the observed invasive range in Europe using bioclimatic, land cover, elevation, soil characteristics and human modification variables.Second, we predicted the susceptibility of salamander species to Bsal infection using a machine-learning model that correlated life history traits with published data on confirmed species infections. Finally, we mapped the geographic ranges of the subset of species that were predicted to be susceptible to Bsal infection. Results:In the United States, the overlap of environmental suitability and susceptible salamander species was greatest in the Pacific Northwest, near the Gulf of Mexico, and along the Atlantic coast, and in inland states east of the Plains region. Main Conclusions:The overlap of these metrics identify salamander populations that may be at risk of developing Bsal infection and suggests priorities for pre-emptive research and conservation measures to protect at-risk salamander species from an additional pathogenic threat.
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<p>Fire is a major disturbance mechanism in arctic-boreal ecosystems and results in warming and cooling feedbacks to the climate system. Greenhouse gas emissions from fires are a major positive feedback, yet post-fire carbon sequestration in recovering ecosystems partly offsets this. In addition, fire removes part of the organic soil layer and may result in permafrost thaw and consequent greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, fire-induced changes in ecosystem structures result in a larger spring-time snow cover compared to unburned areas, and this imposes a negative climate feedback through increased surface albedo. These various climate forcings are spatially and temporally heterogeneous and depend on various landscape components and fire regime characteristics. Understanding the net climate forcing effect is crucial in managing and mitigating climate change impacts on carbon cycling. We applied the concept of radiative forcing in a quantitative spatial assessment of the net climate feedbacks induced by arctic-boreal North American fires. We capitalize upon the state-of-the-art carbon combustion estimates by the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment Fire Emissions Database (ABoVE-FED) and a novel climate forcing framework to predict fire-driven changes in net forcing under historical and future climate scenarios. In our analyses we incorporated all fires between 2001 and 2019, evaluating the net fire-induced forcing over the regrowth successional phase (at 20-years after fire) and after full succession (at 80-years after fire). Our results highlight the spatial and temporal heterogeneity in climate forcings from arctic-boreal fires, and in future work we plan to characterize spatiotemporal patterns of the net climate feedback.</p>
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