Abstract
The accelerated development of energy resources around the world has substantially increased forest change related to oil and gas activities. In some cases, oil and gas activities are the primary catalyst of land-use change in forested landscapes. We discuss the challenges associated with characterizing ecological change related to energy resource development using North America as an exemplar. We synthesize the major impacts of energy development to forested ecosystems and offer new perspectives on how to detect and monitor anthropogenic disturbance during the Anthropocene. The disturbance of North American forests for energy development has resulted in persistent linear corridors, suppression of historical disturbance regimes, novel ecosystems, and the eradication of ecological memory. Characterizing anthropogenic disturbances using conventional patch-based disturbance measures will tend to underestimate the ecological impacts of energy development. Suitable indicators of anthropogenic impacts in forests should be derived from the integration of multi-scalar Earth observations. Relating these indicators to ecosystem condition will be a capstone in the progress toward monitoring forest change in landscapes undergoing rapid energy development.
Highlights
Major transformation of forests by anthropogenic causes remains a critical impetus for quantifying landscape structure in ecology
Anthropogenic impacts to forests can be challenging to detect and characterize and the literature lacks a synthesis of anthropogenic disturbance regimes, especially for land use change related to energy development [5,6]
Anthropogenic disturbances are often characterized by high persistence, especially those related to energy resource development and linear corridors
Summary
Major transformation of forests by anthropogenic causes remains a critical impetus for quantifying landscape structure in ecology. North American forest coverage has increased over the past 100 years (but see [3] for recent net forest losses in Latin America and the Caribbean) and has remained relatively stable over recent decades [2]. Despite the stability of overall forest cover in North America, substantive changes in the arrangement and fragmentation of forest cover has occurred driven by forest management and fire suppression, and increasingly from energy development [4]. Anthropogenic impacts to forests can be challenging to detect and characterize and the literature lacks a synthesis of anthropogenic disturbance regimes, especially for land use change related to energy development [5,6]. We synthesize the major impacts of anthropogenic disturbance in forests related to oil and gas extraction and review the major advancements for characterizing and detecting anthropogenic disturbance regimes using multi-scalar Earth observations
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