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Amy Symstad

USGS researchers from the North Central CASC and the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center recently collaborated with the National Park Service Climate Change Response Program to develop a new product that communicates the results from a collaborative effort—involving resource managers, subject-matter experts, and a larger climate change adaptation team—to identify potential climate impacts and management responses in Badlands National Park. The researchers used scenario planning and ecological simulation modeling to anticipate management challenges and identify options for Badlands National Park and adjacent federal and tribal lands in the coming decades (through 2050). The ecological simulation models help...
The Great Plains Grassland Summit: Challenges and Opportunities from North to South was held April 10-11, 2018 in Denver, Colorado to provide syntheses of information about key grassland topics of interest in the Great Plains; networking and learning channels for managers, researchers, and stakeholders; and working sessions for sharing ideas about challenges and future research and management opportunities. The summit was convened to better understand stressors and resource demands throughout the Great Plains and how to manage them, and to discuss methods for improved collaboration among natural resource managers, scientists, and stakeholders. Over 200 stakeholders, who collectively were affiliated with all of the...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Maintaining the native prairie lands of the Northern Great Plains (NGP), which provide an important habitat for declining grassland species, requires anticipating the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and climate change on the region’s vegetation. Specifically, climate change threatens NGP grasslands by increasing the potential encroachment of native woody species into areas where they were previously only present in minor numbers. This project used a dynamic vegetation model to simulate vegetation type (grassland, shrubland, woodland, and forest) for the NGP for a range of projected future climates and relevant management scenarios. Comparing results of these simulations illustrates...
This report explains scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool in general, then describes how it was applied to Wind Cave National Park as the second part of a pilot project to dovetail climate change scenario planning with National Park Service (NPS) Resource Stewardship Strategy development. In the orientation phase, Park and regional NPS staff, other subject-matter experts, natural and cultural resource planners, and the climate change core team who led the scenario planning project identified priority resource management topics and associated climate sensitivities. Next, the climate change core team used this information to create a set of four divergent climate futures—summaries of relevant climate...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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This data release contains data discussed in its larger work citation (Symstad et al., 2017, Climate Risk Management 17:78-91, Associated Item at right). "ClimateComparisonData.csv" contains summary metrics of six climate projections used as climate input for quantitative simulations of hydrologic and ecological responses to climate change at Wind Cave National Park (WCNP) and the same summary metrics for 38 other climate projections available at the time that these simulations were done. "HydroData.csv" contains mean annual streamflow of a stream in WCNP and mean annual hydraulic head of a subterranean lake in Wind Cave as simulated by the rainfall-response aquifer and watershed flow (RRAWFLOW) model for two climate...
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