C. Wade Ross

Tall Timbers

Hydrologic soil groups (HSGs) are a fundamental component of the USDA curve-number (CN) method for estimation of rainfall runoff; yet these data are not readily available in a format or spatial-resolution suitable for regional-and global-scale modeling applications. We developed a globally consistent, gridded dataset defining HSGs from soil texture...

The pedosphere is the largest terrestrial reservoir of organic carbon, yet soil-carbon variability and its representation in Earth system models is a large source of uncertainty for carbon-cycle science and climate projections. Much of this uncertainty is attributed to local and regional-scale variability, and predicting this variation can be chall...

Africa’s ecosystems have an important role in global carbon dynamics, yet consensus is lacking regarding the amount of carbon stored in woody vegetation and the potential impacts to carbon storage in response to changes in climate, land use and other Anthropocene risks. In this study, we explore the socioenvironmental conditions that have shaped th...

Background Longleaf pine ( Pinus palustris ) ecosystems are recognized as biodiversity hotspots, and their sustainability is tightly coupled to a complex nexus of feedbacks between fire, composition, and structure. While previous research has demonstrated that frequent fire is often associated with higher levels of biodiversity, relationships betwe...

Soil health assessments require the establishment of soil indicators that are easy to measure and sensitive to changes in management practices. Despite the global demand for wood products and the intensification of silvicultural practices, very few indicators are currently used to monitor changes in soil properties and processes in managed forest p...

Forest canopies are important habitats for animal biodiversity globally. The structural and compositional components of canopies influence biodiversity, and recent advancements in remote sensing have given insight to these relationships. As invasive shrubs alter both the structure and composition of forests, we use handheld, mobile LiDAR to relate...

Terrestrial laser scanning of forest structure is used increasingly in place of traditional technologies; however, deriving physical parameters from point clouds remains challenging because LiDAR returns do not have defined areas or volumes. While voxelization methods overcome this challenge, estimation of canopy gaps and other structural attribute...

Tree plantations represent an important component of the global carbon (C) cycle and are expected to increase in prevalence during the 21st century. We examined how silvicultural approaches that optimize economic returns in loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) plantations affected the accumulation of C in pools of vegetation, detritus, and mineral soil u...

The ecological and environmental science communities have embraced machine learning (ML) for empirical modelling and prediction. However, going beyond prediction to draw insights into underlying functional relationships between response variables and environmental ‘drivers’ is less straightforward. Deriving ecological insights from fitted ML models...

Vegetation buffers local diurnal land surface temperatures, however, this effect has found limited applications for remote vegetation characterization. In this work, we parameterize diurnal temperature variations as the thermal decay rate derived by using satellite daytime and nighttime land surface temperatures and modeled using Newton’s law of co...

The WAVeTrends dataset is a 0.05 degree (5.55 km) vegetation change product, spanning the West African Sudano-Sahel region. It provides pixel-wise information on concurrent woody and herbaceous vegetation trends over a 32-year period (1982-2013). Change in woody vegetation was derived using long-term rain use efficiency (RUE) sensitivity, i.e., the...

Savanna woody plants can store significant amounts of carbon while also providing numerous other ecological and socio-economic benefits. However, they are significantly under-represented in widely used tree cover datasets, due to mapping challenges presented by their complex landscapes, and the underestimation of woody plants by methods that exclud...

Globally, the spatial distribution of vegetation is governed primarily by climatological factors (rainfall and temperature, seasonality, and inter-annual variability). The local distribution of vegetation, however, depends on local edaphic conditions (soils and topography) and disturbances (fire, herbivory, and anthropogenic activities). Abrupt spa...

We assess 32 years of vegetation change in the West African Sudano-Sahelian region following the drought events of the 1970s and 1980s. Change in decadal mean rain use efficiency is used to diagnose trends in woody vegetation that is expected to respond more slowly to post-drought rainfall gains, while change in the slope of the productivity–rainfa...

The original version of this Data Descriptor incorrectly referenced the “United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) soilGrids250m system”. This has been corrected to “SoilGrids predictions” throughout the text in both the HTML and PDF versions.

The cover of woody perennial plants (trees and shrubs) in arid ecosystems is at least partially constrained by water availability. However, the extent to which maximum canopy cover is limited by rainfall and the degree to which soil water holding capacity and topography impacts maximum shrub cover are not well understood. Similar to other deserts i...

Remote sensing is the only pragmatic method for long term global vegetation monitoring. Different remotely sensed parameters have been identified to quantify vegetation states and several are operationally used for monitoring vegetation. Small-scale field studies have noted that thermal response to changing diurnal conditions is a useful indicator...

Globally, the spatial distribution of vegetation is driven primarily by climatological factors, interacting locally with disturbances including fire, herbivory and other anthropogenic activities. Depending on the nature of feedbacks, disturbances may trigger alternate states under otherwise similar climatic and edaphic conditions. Previous studies...

The West African Savanna-Sahel (WASS) region features a delicate balance of woody and herbaceous vegetation systems that play an important role in the cycling of carbon, water and energy, while supporting agro-pastoralist livelihoods (food for grazing animals, browse and fuelwood). Quantifying the temporal trends separately for these two types of v...

Rationale: Soils of the US Southeast are estimated to store between 8.9 and 51.2 Pg carbon (C), accounting for more than 1/3 of the total soil C storage for the conterminous US when using the median value. The large range of estimates is due to 1) high spatial variance of soil C, 2) difficulties associated with collecting and analyzing enough sampl...

Over the past decades, a changing climate, land use shifts, socioeconomic development, and political decisions have had a tremendous impact on the spatial and temporal variation of soil carbon. How soil carbon interacts with such changing natural environmental and anthropogenic forcings within various ecosystem domains and spatial and temporal scal...

The profound human-centric dominance in the Anthropocene has created changes in land use, biomes, climate, food networks, economies, and social communities, which in turn have impacted global resources, such as food, energy, and water, as well as the soils, that humanity and other terrestrial life-forms depend on for survival. We posit that a new i...

Land use change is widely recognized as a net source of greenhouse gas emissions at the global scale. Most of these emissions are attributed to losses from aboveground terrestrial pools such as deforestation. However, much less is known about the effects of land use change on soil carbon pools at regional scales. To address this problem, relationsh...

Historically, Florida soils stored the largest amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) among the conterminous U.S. states (2.26Pg). This region experienced rapid land use/land cover (LULC) shifts and climate change in the past decades. The effects of these changes on SOC sequestration are unknown. The objectives of this study were to 1) investigate the...

GlobalSoilMap: Basis of the global spatial soil information system contains contributions that were presented at the 1st GlobalSoilMap conference, held 7-9 Oct…

National assessment of soil carbon across the U.S. has been based on legacy data (Soil Survey Geographic Data – SSURGO and State Soil Geographic Data – STATSGO), which have become outdated due to global climate and land use changes, and human induced disturbances imposed on soil carbon dynamics in soil ecosystems. We present a new soil carbon stock...

Soils may act as a source or sink for atmospheric CO2 and climate and human activities, such as land use change impact soil carbon stocks. Hence, insights on soil C modeling at continental scale are critical to provide significant improvements in understanding the carbon cycle. The objectives of this study were to 1) determine the historic soil C s...