Data from: Regional variation in interior Alaskan boreal forests is driven by fire disturbance, topography, and climate ...

• Main Authors: Roland, Carl, Schmidt, Joshua, Winder, Samantha, Stehn, Sarah, Nicklen, E.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: Betula neoalaskana; Picea glauca; Picea mariana; Populus balsamifera; Yukon; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g6g3416; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.g6g3416

High latitude regions are warming rapidly with important ecological and societal consequences. Utilizing two landscape-scale datasets from interior Alaska, we compared patterns in forest structure in two regions with sharply differing fire disturbance, topography, and climate. Our goal was to evaluate a set of hypotheses concerning possible warming-driven changes in forest structure suggested by recent literature. We found essentially consistent habitat associations for the tree flora across two disparate study areas concomitant with considerable differences in observed patterns of forest structure and composition. Our results confirmed expected increases in broadleaved species occupancy and abundance in the warmer, more fire-affected study region along with considerably higher tree occupancy and abundance in high elevation areas there. However, contrary to our predictions, we found no evidence of expected reductions in conifer occupancy or increases in non-fire related tree mortality. Instead, both ... : YCNP_tree_model_data_1This MS Excel file contains primary response and covariate data used to build models of tree species occupancy and abundance in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.YCNP_tree_model_2This MS Excel file contains additional covariate data used to build models of tree species live occupancy and abundance in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.Mortality_data_for_models_YCNP_vs_DNPPThis MS Excel file contains primary response and covariate data used to build models of tree species morality patterns in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska. ...