Skip to main content

Bruce Stein

thumbnail
Characterization of Montane Ecosystems, Their Microclimates, and Wildlife Distribution and Abundance Across the Hydrographic Great Basin
FY2013This project retrieves four years of data from over 200 temperature sensors nested within 28 sites across ~40 million hectares of the hydrographic Great Basin. The sensors span all major aspects and up to 700 m of elevation within sites, and occur in numerous management jurisdictions in 18 mountain ranges plus other areas not in ranges. This project: Quantifies the variability of climate at micro-, meso-, and macroscales across the Basin, and across diel, seasonal, and interannual periods. Informs management and conservation efforts, in terms of helping calibrate and refine the climatic stage upon which all biological actors and efforts hinge (Beier and Brost 2010). Feeds into other bioclimatic and wildlife...
Categories: Data, Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2013, 2014, Academics & scientific researchers, California, California, All tags...
thumbnail
Evaluating Species’ Adaptive Capacity in a Changing Climate: Applications to Natural-Resource Management in the Northwestern U.S.
Natural resource managers are confronted with the pressing challenge to develop conservation plans that address complex ecological and societal needs against the backdrop of a rapidly changing climate. Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) provide valuable information that helps guide management and conservation actions in this regard. An essential component to CCVAs is understanding adaptive capacity, or the ability of a species to cope with or adjust to climate change. However, adaptive capacity is the least understood and evaluated component of CCVAs. This is largely due to a fundamental need for guidance on how to assess adaptive capacity and incorporate this information into conservation planning...
thumbnail
Conservation Adaptation Planning for Landscape and Climate Change in the Southeast
The Southeast is currently undergoing high rates of population growth, urbanization, and land use change while also experiencing climatic changes. These changes are and will continue to threaten wildlife and their habitats. Most existing conservation programs and activities, however, focus on maintaining systems in their current condition, or returning them to a historic state, rather than enabling systems to adapt to projected changes. Recognizing this problem state fish and wildlife agencies, together with US Fish and Wildlife Service and others, have initiated the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS). This project will support the SECAS effort, which aims to develop a collaborative network of conservation...
Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment): Assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change serves as the basis for climate-adaptation planning and climate-smart conservation, and typically involves an evaluation of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (AC). AC is a species’ ability to cope with or adjust to changing climatic conditions, and is the least understood and most inconsistently applied of these three factors. We propose an attribute-based framework for evaluating the AC of species, identifying two general classes of adaptive responses: “persist in place” and “shift in space”. Persist-in-place attributes enable species to survive in situ, whereas the shift-in-space response...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Worldwide, many species are responding to ongoing climate change with shifts in distribution, abundance, phenology, or behavior. Consequently, natural-resource managers face increasingly urgent conservation questions related to biodiversity loss, expansion of invasive species, and deteriorating ecosystem services. We argue that our ability to address these questions is hampered by the lack of explicit consideration of species’ adaptive capacity (AC). AC is the ability of a species or population to cope with climatic changes and is characterized by three fundamental components: phenotypic plasticity, dispersal ability, and genetic diversity. However, few studies simultaneously address all elements; often, AC is confused...
View more...
ScienceBase brings together the best information it can find about USGS researchers and offices to show connections to publications, projects, and data. We are still working to improve this process and information is by no means complete. If you don't see everything you know is associated with you, a colleague, or your office, please be patient while we work to connect the dots. Feel free to contact sciencebase@usgs.gov.