Presenter: Park Williams, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Dr. Williams will discuss his recent work to derive a forest drought-stress index (FDSI) for the southwestern United States using a comprehensive tree-ring data set representing AD 1000–2007. This FDSI is linked to measures of forest productivity, mortality, bark-beetle outbreak and wildfire. If climate models are accurate, the mean forest drought-stress by the 2050s will exceed that of the most severe droughts in the past 1,000 years. Collectively, the results foreshadow twenty-first-century changes in forest structures and compositions, with transition of forests in the southwestern United States, and perhaps water-limited forests globally, towards distributions unfamiliar to modern civilization.
See related publication here.
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