Anthropogenic climate change is projected to drive increases in climate extremes and climate-sensitive ecosystem disturbances such as wildfire with enormous economic impacts. Understanding spatial and temporal patterns of risk to property values from climate-sensitive disturbances at national and regional scales and from multiple disturbances is urgently needed to inform risk management and policy efforts. Here, we combine models for three major climate-sensitive disturbances (i.e., wildfire, climate stress-driven tree mortality, and insect-driven tree mortality), future climate projections of these disturbances, and high-resolution property values data to quantify the spatiotemporal exposure of property values to disturbance across the contiguous United States (US). We find that property values exposed to these climate-sensitive disturbances increase sharply in future climate scenarios, particularly in existing high-risk regions of the western US, and that novel exposure risks emerge in some currently lower-risk regions such as the southeast and Great Lakes regions. Climate policy that drives emissions towards low-to-moderate climate futures avoids large increases in disturbance risk exposure compared to high emissions scenarios. Our results provide an important large-scale assessment of climate-sensitive disturbance risk to property values to help inform land management and climate adaptation efforts.
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Abstract -
Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2025
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Plant functional traits hold the potential to greatly improve the understanding and prediction of climate impacts on ecosystems and carbon cycle feedback to climate change. Traits are commonly used to place species along a global conservative-acquisitive trade-off, yet how and if functional traits and conservative-acquisitive trade-offs scale up to mediate community and ecosystem fluxes is largely unknown. Here, we combine functional trait datasets and multibiome datasets of forest water and carbon fluxes at the species, community, and ecosystem-levels to quantify the scaling of the tradeoff between maximum flux and sensitivity to vapor pressure deficit. We find a strong conservative-acquisitive trade-off at the species scale, which weakens modestly at the community scale and largely disappears at the ecosystem scale. Functional traits, particularly plant water transport (hydraulic) traits, are strongly associated with the key dimensions of the conservative-acquisitive trade-off at community and ecosystem scales, highlighting that trait composition appears to influence community and ecosystem flux dynamics. Our findings provide a foundation for improving carbon cycle models by revealing i) that plant hydraulic traits are most strongly associated with community- and ecosystem scale flux dynamics and ii) community assembly dynamics likely need to be considered explicitly, as they give rise to ecosystem-level flux dynamics that differ substantially from trade-offs identified at the species-level.
Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 25, 2025 -
Free, publicly-accessible full text available February 1, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2025