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Anthropogenic impacts have altered and degraded global ecosystems. Integrated resource management offers an important solution to enhance collaboration, holistic thinking, and equity by considering diverse perspectives in decision making. In Washington State, Floodplains by Design (FbD) is a floodplain management and habitat restoration program that emphasizes bringing together diverse stakeholders and supporting conversations between local, state, and Tribal governments while enhancing environmental justice in the region. Marginalized communities continue to be disproportionately impacted by environmental disturbances. Our project interviewed Tribal natural resource managers to assess the degree to which they felt...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Climate change is altering fire regimes and post-fire conditions, contributing to relatively rapid transformation of landscapes across the western US. Studies are increasingly documenting post-fire vegetation transitions, particularly from forest to non-forest conditions or from sagebrush to invasive annual grasses. The prevalence of climate-driven, post-fire vegetation transitions is likely to increase in the future with major impacts on social–ecological systems. However, research and management communities have only recently focused attention on this emerging climate risk, and many knowledge gaps remain. We identify three key needs for advancing the management of post-fire vegetation transitions, including centering...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The Pacific Northwest is a hotspot for temperate amphibian biodiversity and is home to many species of salamanders and frogs found nowhere else on earth. Changing climatic conditions threaten habitat for many of these species, primarily through increased air and water temperature and the drying of habitats. Among the most commonly used tools for evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on habitat suitability are species distribution models (SDMs). This approach develops models that describe suitable habitat for a focal species (or set of species) based on relationships between environmental variables and contemporary species occurrences. These models can then be used to predict changes in the availability...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the northwestern US. We destructively sampled 1651 seedlings from 57 sites across 32 fires that burned at moderate or high severity between 2000 and 2015; sites were within 100 m of reproductively mature western larch. Using dendrochronological methods, we estimated germination years of seedlings to calculate annual recruitment rates. We used boosted regression trees to model the annual probability of recruitment as a function of (i) ‘wildfire-related factors’ including distance to seed...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
(Abstract from Springer): There is increasing interest among scholars in producing information that is useful and usable to land and natural resource managers in a changing climate. This interest has prompted transitions from scientist- to stakeholder-driven or collaborative approaches to climate science. A common indicator of successful collaboration is whether stakeholders use the information resulting from the projects in which they are engaged. However, detailed examples of how stakeholders use climate information are relatively scarce in the literature, leading to a challenge in understanding what researchers can and should expect and plan for in terms of stakeholder use of research findings. Drawing on theoretical,...
Tree regeneration is a critical mechanism of forest resilience to stand-replacing wildfire (i.e., where fire results in >90 % tree mortality), and post-fire regeneration is a concern worldwide as the climate becomes warmer. Although post-fire tree regeneration has been relatively well-studied in fire-prone forests across western North America, it is less understood in fire regimes characterized by large patches of stand-replacing fire at long intervals, such as the nominally infrequent, high-severity fire regimes of the western Cascades of Washington and northern Oregon, USA (northwestern Cascadia) where some of world’s highest-biomass forests reside. Recent wildfire activity (2015–2020) in northwestern Cascadia...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) has increased the extent and frequency of fire and negatively affected native plant and animal species across the Intermountain West (USA). However, the strengths of association between cheatgrass occurrence or abundance and fire, livestock grazing, and precipitation are not well understood. We used 14 years of data from 417 sites across 10,000 km(2) in the central Great Basin to assess the effects of the foregoing predictors on cheatgrass occurrence and prevalence (i.e., given occurrence, the proportion of measurements in which the species was detected). We implemented hierarchical Bayesian models and considered covariates for which > 0.90 or < 0.10 of the posterior predictive mass...
Background Climate change has increased wildfire activity in the western USA and limited the capacity for forests to recover post-fire, especially in areas burned at high severity. Land managers urgently need a better understanding of the spatiotemporal variability in natural post-fire forest recovery to plan and implement active recovery projects. In burned areas, post-fire “spectral recovery”, determined by examining the trajectory of multispectral indices (e.g., normalized burn ratio) over time, generally corresponds with recovery of multiple post-fire vegetation types, including trees and shrubs. Field data are essential for deciphering the vegetation types reflected by spectral recovery, yet few studies validate...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
A rapidly changing climate and expanding human footprint is driving changes in the Pacific Northwest landscape that have profound implications for our region’s wildlife. The pace of change often exceeds manager’s ability to monitor environmental conditions that affect at-risk species and assess the status and trends of their habitat. This makes it challenging for managers to know if and to what extent recovery goals and conservation plans for at-risk species need to be modified to account for shifting habitat conditions. Addressing this challenge requires accurate, up-to-date information about how disturbances, shifting climates and land-use affect the amount and distribution of habitat across the region. Importantly,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The hydrological effects of climate change are documented in many regions; however, climate-driven impacts to the source and transport of river nutrients remain poorly understood. Understanding the factors controlling nutrient dynamics across river systems is critical to preserve ecosystem function yet challenging given the complexity of landscape and climate interactions. Here, we harness a large regional dataset of nitrate (NO3–) yield, concentration, and isotopic composition (δ15N and δ18O) to evaluate the strength of hydroclimate and landscape variables in controlling the seasonal source and transport of NO3–. We show that hydroclimate strongly influenced the seasonality of river NO3–, producing distinct, source-dependent...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
As wildfire activity increases and fire-size distributions potentially shift in many forested regions worldwide, anticipating the spatial patterns of burn severity expected with future fire activity is critical for ecological understanding and informing management and policy. Because spatial patterns of burn severity are influenced by a complex mixture of drivers, they remain difficult to predict for any given burned landscape. At broader extents, however, spatial scaling relationships relating high-severity patch size and shape to overall fire size, when combined with scenarios regarding regional area burned and fire-size distributions, offer a means to anticipate the spatial configuration of burn severity in future...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This project aimed to study the distribution and abundance of invasive European green crab (Carcinus maenas, hereafter “green crab”) on Lummi Nation Reservation Tidelands, and to remove this invasive species from the marshy, estuarine areas on the tidelands. Two estuaries were trapped in the Lummi and Nooksack rivers while simultaneously collecting water quality data (salinity and water temperature) and determined if these parameters will inform the Lummi Natural Resources Department (LNR) green crab trapping team of potential areas of green crab settlement. Invasive green crab are capable of enduring short periods of extreme salinity and temperature conditions but how this adaptability translates to the local environment...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Invasive plants formed via hybridization, especially those that modify the structure and function of their ecosystems, are of particular concern given the potential for hybrid vigor. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, two invasive, dune-building beachgrasses, Ammophila arenaria (European beachgrass) and A. breviligulata (American beachgrass), have hybridized and formed a new beachgrass taxa (Ammophila arenaria × A. breviligulata), but little is known about its distribution, spread, and ecological consequences. Here, we report on surveys of the hybrid beachgrass conducted across a 250-km range from Moclips, Washington to Pacific City, Oregon, in 2021 and 2022. We detected nearly 300 hybrid individuals, or an average...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
As the climate warms, societal concern has escalated about wildfires in the western United States, and the risk fire poses to human communities and forest resources. Until recently, there have been few wildfires in the last century in western Washington and northwestern Oregon, making it difficult to know, in this area specifically, how climate change affects wildfire potential or how forests recover when they do burn. This project co-developed and generated key knowledge of how future climate change will affect the potential for wildfires of different sizes in western Washington and northwestern Oregon. We used historical climate data and future projections from climate models to quantify the weather and climatic...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Declines in populations of small mammals associated with high elevations, e.g., marmots (Marmota spp.) and pikas (Ochotona spp.), have been attributed to both direct and indirect effects of environmental changes caused by humans. For example, populations of Olympic marmots (M. olympus) and Vancouver Island marmots (M. vancouverensis) have declined in response to increased predator access to high-elevation marmot habitats. In the North Cascades National Park Service Complex (NOCA), observed mean abundance of hoary marmots (M. caligata) declined by 74% from 2007 to 2016. Although these declines have been linked to harsh winter conditions, the role of predation and its association with decreasing snowpack has yet to...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate. While there is increasing recognition of Indigenous fire stewardship among western scientists and managers, the extent and purpose of cultural burning is generally absent from the landscape–fire modeling literature and our understanding of ecosystem processes and development. In collaboration with the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources, we developed a transdisciplinary Monte...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Kelp forest declines have been linked to warming ocean temperatures worldwide. Ocean warming rarely occurs in isolation, so multiple stressor studies are necessary to understand the physiological responses of kelp to climate change. The canopy-forming bull kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana, is going locally extinct in areas of the Salish Sea that are seasonally warm and nutrient poor, while the understory kelp, Saccharina latissima, persists at those sites. Further, nitrogen availability can alter physiological responses of kelps to temperature stress, including alleviating warming stress. We compared the physiological responses of kelp sporophytes to high temperature stress and nitrogen limitation between two populations...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The goals of the project were to quantify a set of ecosystem services — benefits that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people — that are priorities for the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, the Nisqually Indian Tribe and the surrounding communities. The Nisqually River Delta, located in South Puget Sound, contains a rich mosaic of different coastal habitat types. We modeled how change in these habitats from sea level rise (SLR) or management activities like restoration could affect ecosystem services in the future. We focused on changes to soil carbon accumulation, birdwatching visitation, and juvenile Chinook salmon growth rates, which served a proxy for fishery production. A habitat and carbon...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Wildfire activity throughout western North America is increasing which can have important consequences for species persistence. Native species have evolved disturbance-adapted traits that confer resilience to natural disturbance provided disturbances operate within their historical range of variability. This resilience can erode as disturbance regimes change and begin operating outside this range. We assessed wildfire impacts during 1987–2018 on the northern spotted owl, an imperiled species with complex relationships with late and early seral forest in the Pacific Northwest, USA. We analyzed population- and individual-level wildfire impacts across the frequent-fire portion of the owl's geographic range at two spatial...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Blooms of toxin-producing cyanobacteria are an enduring public health threat in lakes and rivers. In addition to more commonly studied planktonic taxa in lakes, attached cyanobacteria covering riverbeds and lake littoral zones can produce anatoxins, potent neurotoxins of growing concern. However, relative to planktonic blooms, the geographical and temporal extent and ecology of anatoxin-producing benthic cyanobacteria are poorly documented. To increase understanding of the distribution of these cyanobacteria and their relationships with physicochemical variables, we surveyed sites throughout the Klamath River watershed in Northern California, USA, for anatoxins from benthic mats. We used visual surveys, composite...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation