Transformative ecosystem responses to interacting extreme events in a Southwest US mountain landscape: Droughts, forest stress, insect outbreaks, fires, and floods

We use 40 years of diverse ecological monitoring data and place-based personal observations – combined with uniquely-intensive broad-scale tree-ring reconstructions of climate, forest growth, and fire extending back >500 years – to describe impressively transformative ecosystem responses of the Jemez Mountains landscape (in northern New Mexico) to a variety of interacting extreme events, ranging from extensive forest die-offs and high-severity fires to extreme hydrological flows (both high and low). Hotter drought events in the past 20 years are driving a range of disturbances and ecosystem responses that appear increasingly novel relative to multi-centennial time frames.