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South Central CASC

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Time to Restore: Using a Community Based Approach to Identify Key Plant Species for Pollinator Restoration
Pollinator restoration requires information about what species to plant and when to plant them to ensure food sources are available throughout the periods when pollinators are active. Changes in climate, including earlier spring warming and warmer fall temperatures, may cause flowering to become out of sync with pollinator activity. When restoring land to support pollinators, managers are challenged to select a mix of species that support pollinators of concern throughout their periods of activity. Existing planting tools have several disadvantages such as, their usability is location specific, they are virtually non-existent for the South Central region, and they do not often account for future changes in plant...
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Future of Fire in the South Central: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate
Climate projections for the southern Great Plains, and elsewhere in the U.S., indicate that a hotter future with changes in precipitation amount and seasonality is to be expected. As plants become stressed from these changes, wildfire risk increases. One of the most valuable approaches to reducing the impacts of wildfires is fuel reduction through prescribed burns. Fuel reduction helps minimize the destruction of ecological communities, threats of future flooding, and extensive damages by lessening the intensity of future wildfires. Although safe burning practices can largely minimize the risks, prescribed burns may bring some degree of concern among practitioners. The real and perceived risks may include bodily...
Abstract (from Wiley): This study supports efforts directed toward research on large-scale atmospheric patterns and on the variability of tornado outbreaks. Specifically, we applied rotated principal component analysis to identify synoptic-scale patterns of 500-hPa geopotential height associated with tornado outbreaks in the United States. We created a database of historic tornado outbreaks using kernel density estimation on events composed of at least seven tornadoes of magnitude (E)F2 or higher (major tornado outbreaks) that occurred in May from 1950 to 2019 (91 events). Results of the analysis show that the first three principal components explained the majority, that is, 74% of the total variation. Based on...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Estimating the Future Effects of Forest Disturbance on Snow Water Resources in a Changing Environment
In the Western U.S., approximately 65% of the water supply comes from forested regions with most of the water that feeds local rivers coming from snowmelt that originates in mountain forests. The Rio Grande headwaters (I.e. the primary water generating region of the Rio Grande river) is experiencing large changes to the landscape primarily from forest fires and bark beetle infestations. Already, 85% of the coniferous forests in this region have been affected by the bark beetle, and projections indicate greater changes will occur as temperatures increase. In this area, most of the precipitation falls as snow in the winter, reaches a maximum depth in the late spring, and melts away due to warmer temperatures by early...
Future climate projections illuminate our understanding of the climate system and generate data products often used in climate impact assessments. Statistical downscaling (SD) is commonly used to address biases in global climate models (GCM) and to translate large‐scale projected changes to the higher spatial resolutions desired for regional and local scale studies. However, downscaled climate projections are sensitive to method configuration and input data source choices made during the downscaling process that can affect a projection's ultimate suitability for particular impact assessments. Quantifying how changes in inputs or parameters affect SD‐generated projections of precipitation is critical for improving...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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