David D. Breshears

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the first global assessment of recent tree mortality attributed to drought and heat stress and identify key information gaps and scientific uncertainties that currently hinder our ability to predict tree mortality in response to climate change and emphasizes the need for a globally coordinated observation system.

TL;DR: A hydraulically based theory considering carbon balance and insect resistance that allowed development and examination of hypotheses regarding survival and mortality was developed, and incorporating this hydraulic framework may be effective for modeling plant survival andortality under future climate conditions.

TL;DR: The results quantify a trigger leading to rapid, drought-induced die-off of overstory woody plants at subcontinental scale and highlight the potential for such die-offs to be more severe and extensive for future global-change-type drought under warmer conditions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify ten contrasting perspectives that shape the vulnerability debate but have not been discussed collectively and present a set of global vulnerability drivers that are known with high confidence: (1) droughts eventually occur everywhere; (2) warming produces hotter Droughts; (3) atmospheric moisture demand increases nonlinearly with temperature during drought; (4) mortality can occur faster in hotter Drought, consistent with fundamental physiology; (5) shorter Drought can become lethal under warming, increasing the frequency of lethal Drought; and (6) mortality happens rapidly

TL;DR: The most rapid landscape-scale shift of a woody ecotones ever documented is reported: in northern New Mexico in the 1950s, the ecotone between semiarid ponderosa pine forest and pinon-juniper woodland shifted extensively and rapidly and persisted for 40 years.