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The Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling (SAHM) has been created to both expedite habitat modeling and help maintain a record of the various input data, pre- and post-processing steps and modeling options incorporated in the construction of a species distribution model through the established workflow management and visualization VisTrails software. This paper provides an overview of the VisTrails:SAHM software including a link to the open source code, a table detailing the current SAHM modules, and a simple example modeling an invasive weed species in Rocky Mountain National Park, USA.
This capacity-building activity supported three tribal college and university (TCU) mini-­grants to initiate student phenological and meteorological observation projects in support of climate change research, to document impacts of climate change and development of indigenous geography curriculum. Students made observations of culturally and/or traditionally significant plants to generate data sets for use in climate change impact assessment of these plants and plant communities. The activity contributed to the larger national efforts of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s “Indigenous Geography” curricula, by engaging with students at tribal colleges to explore the linkage between the “seasonality”...
The project team, funded by the NC CSC, worked in two river basins in southwestern Colorado (San Juan and Gunnison) to focus on five objectives: 1) understand social-ecological vulnerabilities, 2) create scenarios and models to facilitate decision making, 3) develop actionable adaptation strategies, 4) identify institutional arrangements needed for adaptation, and 5) document and transfer best practices. The team was interested in the intersection of the climate system, the ecological system, and the social system. Social and natural scientists worked together and with many stakeholders to achieve these objectives.
Members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes have been working with an interdisciplinary team of social, ecological, and climate scientists from the North Central CSC, the High Plains Regional Climate Center, and the National Drought Mitigation Center along with other university and agency partners to prepare regular climate and drought summaries to aid in managing water resources on the Wind River Reservation and in surrounding areas.
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In southwestern Colorado, land managers anticipate the impacts of climate change to include higher temperatures, more frequent and prolonged drought, accelerated snowmelt, larger and more intense fires, more extreme storms, and the spread of invasive species. These changes put livelihoods, ecosystems, and species at risk. Focusing on communities in southwestern Colorado’s San Juan and Gunnison river basins, this project will expand opportunities for scientists, land managers, and affected residents to identify actions that can support resilience and adaptation in the face of changing climate conditions. This project builds on the project “Building Social and Ecological Resilience to Climate Change in southwestern...
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Researchers with the North Central Climate Science Center have made substantial progress in assessing the impacts of climate and land use change on wildlife and ecosystems across the region. Building on this progress, researchers will work with stakeholders to identify adaptation strategies and inform resource management in the areas that will be most affected by changing conditions. There are several components of this project. First, researchers will use the Department of Interior “resource briefs” as a mechanism to communicate information to resource managers on climate and land use change and their impacts to resources. These briefs will support coordinated management of ecosystems that contain public, private,...
Abstract (from http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789400775145): This volume offers a scientific assessment of the effects of climatic variability and change on forest resources in the United States. Derived from a report that provides technical input to the 2013 U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the book serves as a framework for managing U.S. forest resources in the context of climate change. The authors focus on topics having the greatest potential to alter the structure and function of forest ecosystems, and therefore ecosystem services, by the end of the 21st century. Part I provides an environmental context for assessing the effects of climate change on forest resources, summarizing...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: North Central CASC
Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174045): Several studies have projected increases in drought severity, extent and duration in many parts of the world under climate change. We examine sources of uncertainty arising from the methodological choices for the assessment of future drought risk in the continental US (CONUS). One such uncertainty is in the climate models’ expression of evaporative demand (E0), which is not a direct climate model output but has been traditionally estimated using several different formulations. Here we analyze daily output from two CMIP5 GCMs to evaluate how differences in E0 formulation, treatment of meteorological driving data, choice of GCM,...
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Covering 120 million acres across 14 western states and 3 Canadian provinces, sagebrush provides critical habitat for species such as pronghorn, mule deer, and sage-grouse – a species of conservation concern. The future of these and other species is closely tied to the future of sagebrush. Yet this important ecosystem has already been affected by fire, invasive species, land use conversion, and now, climate change. In the western U.S., temperatures are rising and precipitation patterns are changing. However, there is currently a limited ability to anticipate the impacts of climate change on sagebrush. Current methods suffer from a range of weakness that limits the reliability of results. In fact, the current uncertainty...
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This dataset is a shapefile that contains the grid outlines and identifiers for the tiles produced by the TopoWx ("Topographical Weather/Climate") temperature dataset as applied to the USGS North Central Climate Center Domain and the surrounding area of Montana. The TopoWx dataset contains gridded daily temperature and is an interpolated spatio-temporaldataset in the same vein as the well-known PRISM (http://www.prism.oregonstate.edu) and Daymet products (http://daymet.ornl.gov). Daily Tmin and Tmax are provided at a 30-arcsec resolution (~800m) from 1948-2012 along with the latest 30-year monthly normals (1981-2010). The goals of the TopoWx project were to produce a dataset that: (1) incorporates key landscape-scale...
Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-014-0585-0): Drought is a part of the normal climate variability and the life and livelihoods of the Western United States. However, drought can also be a high impact or extreme event in some cases, such as the exceptional 2002 drought that had deleterious impacts across the Western United States. Studies of long-term climate variability along with climate change projections indicate that the Western United States should expect much more severe and extended drought episodes than experienced over the last century when most modern water law and policies were developed, such as the 1922 Colorado River Compact. This paper will discuss research examining...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Drought, North Central CASC
The Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) is an experimental drought monitoring and early warning guidance tool. It examines how anomalous the atmospheric evaporative demand (E0; also known as "the thirst of the atmosphere") is for a given location and across a time period of interest. EDDI is multi-scalar, meaning that this period—or "timescale"—can vary to capture drying dynamics that themselves operate at different timescales; we generate EDDI at 1-week through 12-month timescales. This webpage offers a frequently updated assessment of current conditions across CONUS, southern parts of Canada, and northern parts of Mexico; a tool to generate historical time series of EDDI for a user-selected region; introductions...
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-15-0042.1): Drought is a natural part of the historical climate variability in the northern Rocky Mountains and high plains region of the United States. However, recent drought impacts and climate change projections have increased the need for a systematized way to document and understand drought in a manner that is meaningful to public land and resource managers. The purpose of this exploratory study was to characterize the ways in which some federal and tribal natural resource managers experienced and dealt with drought on lands managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and tribes in two case site examples (northwest Colorado and southwest...
Abstract (from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0111669): Projected climate change at a regional level is expected to shift vegetation habitat distributions over the next century. For the sub-alpine species whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), warming temperatures may indirectly result in loss of suitable bioclimatic habitat, reducing its distribution within its historic range. This research focuses on understanding the patterns of spatiotemporal variability for future projected P.albicaulis suitable habitat in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) through a bioclimatic envelope approach. Since intermodel variability from General Circulation Models (GCMs) lead to differing predictions...
Abstract (from http://www.srmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.2111/REM-D-13-00079.1): Big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata Nuttall (Asteraceae), is the dominant plant species of large portions of semiarid western North America. However, much of historical big sagebrush vegetation has been removed or modified. Thus, regeneration is recognized as an important component for land management. Limited knowledge about key regeneration processes, however, represents an obstacle to identifying successful management practices and to gaining greater insight into the consequences of increasing disturbance frequency and global change. Therefore, our objective is to synthesize knowledge about natural big sagebrush regeneration. We identified...
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One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. In order to plan for this uncertain future, managers have begun to use a tool known as scenario planning, in which climate models are used to identify different plausible climate conditions, known as “scenarios”, for a particular area. In a previous project, researchers with the North Central Climate Science Center worked with natural resource managers at Badlands National Park and on surrounding federal lands to model how different climate scenarios and management activities would impact the area’s resources. The model that was developed answers critical “what if” questions...
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The goal of this project was to identify climate-related scientific information needs in the North Central region that will support the management of key species and help avoid species declines. Researchers worked closely with state fish and wildlife agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, tribes, and other relevant natural resource management and conservation agencies to identify priority information needs and to design and implement studies that will address these needs. Researchers identified stakeholders, including those engaged by the North Central Climate Science Center USGS Liaisons project. Researchers worked with stakeholders to identify priority conservation targets. Selected targets were those...
The North Central Climate Science Center Paleoenvironmental Database serves as an archive of Pleistocene proxy records, metadata and derivative products (e.g., chronologies, vegetation and climate reconstructions), and provides a resource for environmental research, facilitating data viewing, synthesis and joint analysis of multiproxy datasets. As of March 2014, the database consists of 1270 paleoenvironmental records, including proxies of climate (i.e., tree-rings, borehole temperatures, isotopes, diatoms, electrical conductivity, ice cores, loess accumulation), streamflow (i.e., tree rings), fauna (i.e., fossils), vegetation (i.e., pollen, plant macrofossils) and fire (i.e., tree-scars, charcoal).
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In the North Central U.S., drought is a dominant driver of ecological, economic, and social stress. Drought conditions have occurred in the region due to lower precipitation, extended periods of high temperatures and evaporative demand, or a combination of these factors. This project will continue ongoing efforts to identify and address climate science challenges related to drought, climate extremes, and the water cycle that are important for natural resource managers and scientists in the North Central region, to support adaptation planning. To accomplish this goal, researchers sought to (1) provide data and synthesis on drought processes in the region and on how evaporative stress on ecosystems will change during...
Ecological niche models predict plant responses to climate change by circumscribing species distributions within a multivariate environmental framework. Most projections based on modern bioclimatic correlations imply that high-elevation species are likely to be extirpated from their current ranges as a result of rising growing-season temperatures in the coming decades. Paleoecological data spanning the last 15,000 years from the Greater Yellowstone region describe the response of vegetation to past climate variability and suggest that white pines, a taxon of special concern in the region, have been surprisingly resilient to high summer temperature and fire activity in the past. Moreover, the fossil record suggests...
map background search result map search result map TopoWx ("Topographical Weather/Climate") temperature dataset tile grid Forecasting Future Changes in Sagebrush Distribution and Abundance Building Social and Ecological Resilience to Climate Change in Southwestern Colorado: Phase 2 Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 1 Foundational Science Area: Climate Adaptation Strategies for Wildlife and Habitats in the North Central U.S. Foundational Science Area: Ecological Drought, Climate Extremes, and the Water Cycle in the North Central U.S. Informing Climate Change Adaptation Planning in National Parks Informing Climate Change Adaptation Planning in National Parks Building Social and Ecological Resilience to Climate Change in Southwestern Colorado: Phase 2 Forecasting Future Changes in Sagebrush Distribution and Abundance Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 1 Foundational Science Area: Climate Adaptation Strategies for Wildlife and Habitats in the North Central U.S. Foundational Science Area: Ecological Drought, Climate Extremes, and the Water Cycle in the North Central U.S. TopoWx ("Topographical Weather/Climate") temperature dataset tile grid