Climate research for ecological monitoring and assessment: a New England example

The role of climate research as it applies to the emerging area of monitoring and assessment of ecological status, health and trends is discussed. Such applications require techniques that synthesize multiple, often interacting sources of climate-derived ecological stress. These stresses operate across multiple plant and animal species and span a range of temporal and spatial hierarchical scales. A working hypothesis of forest ecosystem/climate interactions is proposed. The basis of the hypothesis is the definition of climatological persistence and disturbance characteristics of a region. A climate database was assembled for the northeastern United States. Summaries that synthesize the spatial distribution, frequency, area and magnitude of climatological disturbance events are presented. These summaries are specifically designed to facilitate the testing of the interaction hypothesis proposed in the present study. Conclusions concerning climate stress in the area, as suggested by a 1961 to 1970 disturbance summary, are compared to results of recent research concerning declines in high elevation red spruce. The present research is the first step in the development of regional scale climate disturbance/forest ecosystem relationships. Future research will seek to link operational observations of forest status and behavior with these multivariate, climatological summaries.