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Projected warming of global surface air temperatures will further exacerbate droughts, wildfires, and other agents of ecosystem stress. We use latewood blue intensity from high‐elevationPicea engelmanniito reconstruct late‐summer maximum air temperature for the Greater Yellowstone Ecoregion (GYE) spanning 770–2019 CE. Using a robust regression model (r² = 0.60), the 1,250‐year reconstruction reveals 2016 as the single‐warmest year and the warming trend since ca. 2000 as the most intense. The Medieval Climate Anomaly contained the highest‐ranking warm event (1050–1070 CE) and was characterized by substantial multidecadal variability rather than a period of prolonged, homogeneous warming. We document regional expression of past warm and cool events, such as an anomalously warm period spanning the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and the Maunder and Dalton minima of the Little Ice Age. Summer temperature variability across the GYE shows multicentennial agreement with trends in solar irradiance, volcanic activity, snowpack, and other regional‐to‐hemispheric temperature records.

 

The 1988 Yellowstone fire altered the structure of the local forest ecosystem and left large non-recovery areas. This study assessed the pre-fire drivers and post-fire characteristics of the recovery and non-recovery areas and examined possible reasons driving non-recovery of the areas post-fire disturbance. Non-recovery and recovery areas were sampled with 44,629 points and 77,501 points, from which attribute values related to topography, climate, and subsequent soil conditions were extracted. We calculated the 1988 Yellowstone fire burn thresholds using the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and official fire maps. We used a burn severity map from the US Forest Service to calculate the burn severity values. Spatial regressions and Chi-Square tests were applied to determine the statistically significant characteristics of a lack of recovery. The non-recovery areas were found to cover 1005.25 km2. Among 11 variables considered as potential factors driving recovery areas and 13 variables driving non-recovery areas, elevation and maximum temperature were found to have high Variance Inflation Factors (4.73 and 4.72). The results showed that non-recovery areas all experienced severe burns and were located at areas with steeper slopes (13.99°), more precipitation (871.73 mm), higher pre-fire vegetation density (NDVI = 0.38), higher bulk density (750.03 kg/m3), lower soil organic matter (165.61 g/kg), and lower total nitrogen (60.97 mg/L). Chi-square analyses revealed statistically different pre-fire forest species (p < 0.01) and soil order (p < 0.01) in the recovery and non-recovery areas. Although Inceptisols dominated in both recovery and non-recovery areas, however, the composition of Mollisols was higher in the non-recovery areas (14%) compared to the recovery areas (11%). This indicated the ecological memory of the non-recovery site reverting to grassland post-disturbance. Unlike conventional studies only focusing on recovery areas, this study analyzed the non-recovery areas and found the key characteristics that make a landscape not resilient to the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The significant effects of elevation, precipitation, and soil pH on recovery may be significant to the forest management and forest resilience in the post-fire period. 

Global warming and related disturbances, such as drought, water, and heat stress, are causing forest decline resulting in regime shifts. Conventional studies have combined tree-ring width (TRW) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to reconstruct NDVI values and ignored the influences of mixed land covers. We built an integrated TRW-NDVI model and reconstructed the annual NDVI maps by using 622 Landsat satellite images and tree cores from 15 plots using point-by-point regression. Our model performed well in the study area, as demonstrated by significant reconstructions for 71.14% (p < 0.05) of the area with the exclusion of water and barren areas. The error rate between the reconstructed NDVI using the conventional approach and our approach could reach 10.36%. The 30 m resolution reconstructed NDVI images in the recent 100 years clearly displayed a decrease in vegetation density and detected decades-long regime shifts from 1906 to 2015. Our study site experienced five regime shifts, markedly the 1930s and 1950s, which were megadroughts across North America. With fine resolution maps, regime shifts could be observed annually at the centennial scale. They can also be used to understand how the Yellowstone ecosystem has gradually changed with its ecological legacies in the last century.