Filters: partyWithName: North Central CASC (X) > partyWithName: Brian W Miller (X)
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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 National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in nearly 100 parks, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to be responsive and adaptive to future climate change. As a step toward developing a process to address this need, this project worked with Dinosaur National Monument to consider climate change in its grazing management planning process. In this project, we convened researchers, managers, subject-matter experts, and climate change adaptation specialists through a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to develop and apply a small set of challenging,...
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
In the North Central region, invasive species and climate change are intricately linked to changing fire regimes, and together, these drivers can have pronounced effects on ecosystems. When fires burn too hot or too frequently, they can prevent slow-growing native plants from regrowing. When this happens, the landscape can transform into a new type of ecosystem, such as a forest becoming a grassland. This process is known as “ecosystem transformation”. This project will explore key management priorities including native community resilience and management of invasive species, wildfire, and ecosystem change, in a collaboration of researchers working directly with land managers and other stakeholders through the...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2023,
CASC,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Invasive grasses,
Successful conservation of ecosystems in a changing climate requires actionable research that directly supports the rethinking and revising of management approaches to address changing risks and opportunities. As an important first step toward actionable research, we reviewed and synthesized grassland management-related documents to identify broadly shared questions that, if answered, would help to support collective conservation of the grasslands in the northern Great Plains of the United States in a changing climate. A Management Priorities Working Group reviewed 183 grassland-relevant management documents and identified 70 questions. Feedback was iteratively provided by a Climate and Ecology Working Group, an...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible future climates that could occur at a specific place and time. Divergent climate futures that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions support information needs of decision makers, including understanding the spectrum of potential resource responses to climate change, developing strategies robust to...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. To help federal land managers address this need, the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) has been working with the National Park Service (NPS) to pioneer an approach for incorporating climate science and scenario planning into NPS planning processes, in particular Resource Stewardship Strategies (RSS). These strategies serve as a long-range planning tool for a national park unit to achieve its desired natural and cultural resource conditions, and are used to guide a park’s full spectrum of resource-specific management plans and day-to-day management activities....
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Context Agent-based models (ABMs) and state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) have proven useful for understanding processes underlying social-ecological systems and evaluating practical questions about how systems might respond to different scenarios. ABMs can simulate a variety of agents (autonomous units, such as wildlife or people); agent characteristics, decision-making, adaptive behavior, and mobility; and agent-environment interactions. STSMs are flexible and intuitive stochastic landscape models that can track scenarios and integrate diverse data. Both can be run spatially and track metrics of management success. Objectives Due to the complementarity of these approaches, we sought to couple them through...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
The impacts of climate change (CC) on natural and cultural resources are far-reaching and complex. A major challenge facing resource managers is not knowing the exact timing and nature of those impacts. To confront this problem, scientists, adaptation specialists, and resource managers have begun to use scenario planning (SP). This structured process identifies a small set of scenarios—descriptions of potential future conditions that encompass the range of critical uncertainties—and uses them to inform planning. We reflect on a series of five recent participatory CC SP projects at four US National Park Service units and derive guidelines for using CC SP to support natural and cultural resource conservation. Specifically,...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Trees are bioindicators of global climate change and regional urbanization, but available monitoring tools are ineffective for fine-scale observation of many species. Using six accelerometers mounted on two urban ash trees (Fraxinus americana), we looked at high-frequency tree vibrations, or change in periodicity of tree sway as a proxy for mass changes, to infer seasonal patterns of flowering and foliage (phenophases). We compared accelerometer-estimated phenophases to those derived from digital repeat photography using Green Chromatic Coordinates (GCC) and visual observation of phenophases defined by the USA National Phenology Network (NPN). We also drew comparisons between two commercial accelerometers and assessed...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Managing resources under climate change is a high-stakes and daunting task, especially because climate change and associated complex biophysical responses engender sustained directional changes as well as abrupt transformations. This environmental non-stationarity challenges assumptions and expectations among scientists, managers, rights holders, and stakeholders. These challenges are anything but straightforward – a high degree of uncertainty impedes our ability to predict the environmental trajectory with confidence, and affected resources often span multiple governance jurisdictions or are subject to competing management objectives. Fortunately, tools exist to help grapple with such challenges. Two commonly used...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Tribal Partnership Science (TPS) is a rapidly growing field that brings together biophysical and social scientists, federally recognized tribes, and federal land management agencies. TPS is essential for addressing complex environmental challenges facing tribes and their homelands. In recent years, a proliferation of methods, frameworks, and guidance for TPS has emerged from diverse scientific disciplines, geographies, and management contexts. This has made it difficult for scientists to keep up with the latest developments and to apply them effectively. This project will synthesize, pragmatize, and tailor the science-to-date for TPS in the contiguous United States (CONUS). Specifically, we will produce a cohesive...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2022,
CASC,
Indigenous Peoples,
Indigenous Peoples,
North Central,
Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life-cycle stages which can be observed across spatial and temporal scales that span orders of magnitude (e.g., organisms to landscapes). The variety of scales at which phenological processes operate is reflected in the range of methods for collecting phenologically relevant data, and the programs focused on these collections. Consideration of the scale at which phenological observations are made, and the platform used for observation, is critical for the interpretation of phenological data and the application of these data to both research questions and land management objectives. However, there is currently little capacity to facilitate access, integration and...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
This "In Brief" article describes the use of scenario planning to facilitate climate change adaptation in the National Park Service. It summarizes best practices and innovations for using climate change scenario planning, with an emphasis on management outcomes and manager perspectives. The scenario planning approach and management outcomes highlighted in this article are the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between the USGS and the National Park Service.
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the largest area of public lands in the United States. Decision-making on BLM lands is complex because managers have to balance diverse, sometimes conflicting, resources, uses, and values. Land managers are more likely to achieve long-term land management goals and balance multiple desired uses and values across public landscapes when their decisions are informed by the best available science, including climate science. Strengthening the use of science and climate information in federal decision making is a priority for the current administration and for federal agencies, including the BLM. The Climate Adaptation Science Centers are committed to developing climate science...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2023,
CASC,
Landscapes,
Landscapes,
North Central,
Grasslands in the Great Plains are of ecological, economic, and cultural importance in the United States. In response to a need to understand how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center led a synthesis of peer-reviewed climate and ecology literature relevant to grassland management in the North Central Region (including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas). This synthesis was done to begin to address grassland managers’ information needs and identify research gaps. This open-file report summarizes the impacts of climate change and variability...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service
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