Focusing on the example of the Lost Pines forest of Texas, this book contextualises the present-day conservation of the Lost Pines within its wealth of historical and geological records. This in turn presents a realistic example for examining evolutionary dynamics models and how they can guide management of temperate pine forests under the uncertainty of future climate change.
Synthesising knowledge from many scholarly disciplines, and presenting the latest knowledge on how temperate forests respond to climate change, the book provides insight into how resource professionals actually solve complex multi-layered problems.
A useful aid for forest management professionals and for advanced students and professionals in ecology, the book is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals, which can also be used as a classroom exercise for spatial imaging, testing virtual simulations and developing field-based research questions.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Section I: Human Impacts on North American Forests
1. Human-Induced Climate Change
2. Predicting How Forests Will Respond
Section II: The Lost Pines Narrative
3. A Forest Within a Prairie
4. A Lost Pine Archipelago
5. Tale of Two Rivers
Section III: An Evolutionary Synthesis
6. Survival of Past Climate Change Events
7. What the Pine Life Cycle Contributes
8. Short-term Evolutionary Processes
Section IV: A First Approximation for the Future
9. Genetic Composition of the Planted Forest
10. Three Scenarios and A Conclusion
Lexicon
A long-time academic, Dr. Williams was a tenured full professor at Texas A&M. She resigned in 2004 then spent several years at Duke University's Nicholas School (2004) and Department of Biology (2005-2007). Prior to that she managed an R&D program and later an operational tree breeding program for Weyerhaeuser Company. After that sher served as a science adviser on energy and environment to U.S. State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. Having authored over 100 scientific publications, Dr. Williams resides as a Distinguished Scholar at the Forest History Society and she has been a resident of NESCent, the national center for evolutionary synthesis run jointly by Duke, NC State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later this fall, she will be working at the University of Goettingen in Lower Saxony. Dr. Williams has also been recognized with numerous honors and awards: Fulbright Senior Scholar to Canada, Bullard Fellow at Harvard and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author of two books, one of which is Conifer Reproductive Biology (Springer Publishers, 2009).