Extent and causes of conifer encroachment into subalpine meadows in the central Sierra Nevada

Mountain meadows provide a number of ecosystem services, including sequestering carbon, storing and regulating the release of water, and maintaining biodiversity. However, as with other grassland systems, many meadows are currently experiencing woody plant encroachment. In my first chapter, I used a landscape scale survey of mountain meadows in the central Sierra Nevada to quantify the extent of conifer encroachment, the density of encroaching...