Developing spatially explicit and stochastic measures of ecological departure

Louis Provencher; Sarah Byer; Kevin J. Badik; Michael J. Clifford

doi:10.1071/WF23038

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Developing spatially explicit and stochastic measures of ecological departure

Louis Provencher ^A ^* , Sarah Byer ^A , Kevin J. Badik ^A and Michael J. Clifford ^B

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A The Nature Conservancy, 639 Isbell Road, no. 330, Reno, NV 89509, USA.

^B The Nature Conservancy, 8329 West Sunset Road, Suite 200, Las Vegas, NV 89113, USA.

^* Correspondence to: lprovencher@tnc.org

International Journal of Wildland Fire 33, WF23038 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF23038

Submitted: 16 March 2023 Accepted: 19 March 2024 Published: 23 April 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Background

Ecological departure is a metric applied to mapped ecological systems measuring dissimilarity between the distributions of observed and expected proportions of non-stochastic reference vegetation classes within an area.

Aims

We created spatially explicit measures of ecological departure incorporating stochasticity for each ecological system and all ecological systems from a central Nevada, USA, landscape.

Methods

Spatially explicit ecological departures were estimated from a radius from each pixel governed by a distance-decay function within a moving window. Variability was introduced by simulating replicate climate time series for each spatial reference condition and calculating departure per replicate.

Key results

Single-system spatial ecological departure was high and extensive, except for one area of low-elevation groundwater-dependent systems. Variance of spatial ecological departure was extensively low, except in areas of lower ecological departure, despite vegetation differences among replicates. The multiple-system ecological departure exhibited lower values.

Conclusions

Spatial ecological departure is warranted for efficient land management as results were concordant between non-spatial and spatial metrics; however, rapid coding languages will be required.

Implications

Spatially explicit ecological departure of both single and multiple systems facilitate localised vegetation and wildlife habitat management and land protection decisions.

Keywords: central Nevada, USA, fire regime condition, historic range of variation, LANDFIRE, spatial ecological departure, state-and-transition simulation modelling, stochastic reference condition, ST-Sim, Syncrosim.

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