Document Type

Article

Department/Program

Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Publication Date

2022

Journal

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

Volume

20

Issue

9

First Page

496

Last Page

497

Abstract

Commentary:

Extreme events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have increased in frequency and intensity. It is no longer a question of if, but rather when and where these events will occur (Stott 2016), with adverse impacts on essential ecosystem
services including clean water, harvestable materials, and carbon sequestration. In some cases, extreme events such as wildfires may have positive impacts on populations and ecosystems. Managing these impacts requires understanding how environmental context as well as ecosystem and disturbance characteristics drive system responses (Hogan et al. 2020). However, funding for ecological extreme events research, such as through the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) RAPID program, is typically reactive. Pre-event data, a RAPID prerequisite, are
typically lacking or only sporadically available, and case studies of extreme events often arise from chance disturbances at existing long-term research sites. This reactive stochastic approach has seeded the literature with unplanned case studies describing individual events. While useful for meta-analyses (eg Patrick et al. 2022), such studies provide limited spatiotemporal inference and predictive capacity. Prioritizing the study of extreme events and empirically testing fundamental concepts in disturbance ecology is paramount (Aoki et al. 2022). (...)

DOI

doi:10.1002/fee.2569

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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