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Climate policy developers and natural resource managers frequently desire high-resolution climate data to prepare for future effects of climate change. But they face a long-standing problem: the vast majority of climate models have been run at coarse resolutions—from hundreds of kilometers in global climate models (GCMs) down to 25–50 kilometers in regional climate models (RCMs).
Evaporative demand (E0) both drives and responds to droughts based on interactions across the land surface-atmosphere interface, and can be exploited to signal agricultural, hydrologic, and ecological droughts. In this chapter, we argue that using a fully physically based measure of E0 moves the drought community toward a more complete understanding of drought processes that will enhance its abilities with regard to early warning and drought monitoring in the present day and drought-risk assessment under future climate change scenarios. We examine regional characteristics in E0 and their behavior during droughts in the recent historical period across different hydroclimates. We review physical mechanisms driving...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
An estimated 50–80% of North America’s ducks use the millions of wetland basins in the Prairie Pothole Region as breeding habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) National Wildlife Refuge System has conserved approximately 1.3 million hectares of grasslands and wetlands in the United States portion of the Prairie Pothole Region with the primary purpose to support breeding duck habitat. A major assumption inherent to the current conservation approach is that wetlands that have historically provided the highest value to breeding ducks will continue to do so into the future. The dynamic nature of climate in the Northern Great Plains and continued increases in air temperatures and precipitation variability...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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,...
Southwestern Colorado is already experiencing the effects of climate change in the form of larger and more severe wildfires, prolonged severe droughts, tree mortality from insect outbreaks, and earlier snowmelt. Climate scientists expect the region to experience more frequent summer heat waves, longer-lasting and more frequent droughts, and decreased river flow in the future (Lukas et al. 2014). These changes will ultimately impact local communities and challenge natural resource managers in allocating water and range for livestock grazing under unpredictable drought conditions, managing forests in the face of changing fire regimes, and managing threatened species under shifting ecological conditions. Considering...
Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution): Tallgrass prairie ecosystems in North America are heavily degraded and require effective restoration strategies if prairie specialist taxa are to be preserved. One common management tool used to restore grassland is the application of a seed-mix of native prairie plant species. While this technique is effective in the short-term, it is critical that species' resilience to changing climate be evaluated when designing these mixes. By utilizing species distribution models (SDMs), species' bioclimatic envelopes–and thus the geographic area suitable for them–can be quantified and predicted under various future climate regimes, and current seed-mixes may be modified...
Abstract (from One Earth): Novel forms of drought are emerging globally, due to climate change, shifting teleconnection patterns, expanding human water use, and a history of human influence on the environment that increases the probability of transformational ecological impacts. These costly ecological impacts cascade to human communities, and understanding this changing drought landscape is one of today’s grand challenges. By using a modified horizon-scanning approach that integrated scientists, managers, and decision-makers, we identified the emerging issues in ecological drought that represent key challenges to timely and effective responses. Here we review the themes that most urgently need attention, including...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Climate change is expected to disproportionately affect species occupying ecosystems with relatively hard boundaries, such as alpine ecosystems. Wildlife managers must identify actions to conserve and manage alpine species into the future, while considering other issues and uncertainties. Climate change and respiratory pathogens associated with widespread pneumonia epidemics in bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) may negatively affect mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) populations. Mountain goat demographic and population data are challenging to collect and sparsely available, making population management decisions difficult. We developed predictive models incorporating these uncertainties and analyzed results within...
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
This project facilitated the engagement of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s (NC CASC) Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) to identify and address the physical climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and natural resource managers in the NC CASC region, as well as meet their needs for climate information to assess impacts to their desired system and develop strategies for effective climate adaptation. A drought index called the Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) was developed to provide a near real-time assessment of soil moisture conditions across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) based on satellite observations. This projects also supported development of...
This project supported the activities of the Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) at the North Central Climate Science Adaptation Center (NC CASC). These activities included foundational research into drought processes relevant to the different climatic zones and ecosystems in the NC CASC region. We examined role of the atmospheric thirst for water from the land surface (aka, Evaporative Demand), how that may change during the 21st century and affect drought related risks in the future. We developed and did outreach with a drought index called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), that solely looks at the Evaporative Demand parameter, for its drought early warning potential, its ability to capture flash...
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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...
Managers are increasingly being asked to integrate climate change adaptation into public land management. The literature discusses a range of adaptation approaches, including managing for resistance, resilience, and transformation; but many strategies have not yet been widely tested. This study employed in-depth interviews and scenario-based focus groups in the Upper Gunnison Basin in Colorado to learn how public land managers envision future ecosystem change, and how they plan to utilize different management approaches in the context of climate adaptation. While many managers evoked the past in thinking about projected climate impacts and potential responses, most managers in this study acknowledged and even embraced...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
How robust is our assessment of impacts to ecosystems and species from a rapidly changing climate during the 21st century? We examine the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and constraints associated with applying climate projections to understanding future biological responses. This includes an evaluation of how to incorporate the uncertainty associated with different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios and climate models, and constraints of spatiotemporal scales and resolution of climate data into impact assessments. We describe the challenges of identifying relevant climate metrics for biological impact assessments and evaluate the usefulness and limitations of different methodologies of applying climate change...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
"Motivation": The motivation for this briefing is to examine the large inhomogeneity (step shift) in the observed temperature record at the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) stations in the Intermountain West—Colorado, Utah and Wyoming—and its implications for climate, hydrology and ecological research in the region. This issue impacts the entire SNOTEL network across the 11 Western states, as demonstrated by Jared Oyler of the University of Montana and his colleagues in Oyler et al. (2015). Here we build on that work by performing finer-grained analyses, and identifying the implications for climate studies that have incorporated SNOTEL temperature data. In doing so, we intend to promote a broader awareness of this issue...
Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2692-0/fulltext.html): The future rate of climate change in mountains has many potential human impacts, including those related to water resources, ecosystem services, and recreation. Analysis of the ensemble mean response of CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) shows amplified warming in high elevation regions during the cold season in boreal midlatitudes. We examine how the twenty-first century elevation-dependent response in the daily minimum surface air temperature [d(ΔTmin)/dz] varies among 27 different GCMs during winter for the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario. The focus is on regions within the northern hemisphere mid-latitude band between 27.5°N...
This 2-pager describes the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), which is a drought index that can serve as an indicator of both rapidly evolving “flash” droughts (developing over a few weeks) and sustained droughts (developing over months but lasting up to years).
    map background search result map search result map Synthesis of Climate and Ecological Science to Support Grassland Management Priorities in the North Central Region Synthesis of Climate and Ecological Science to Support Grassland Management Priorities in the North Central Region