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Folders: ROOT > ScienceBase Catalog > National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers > Northwest CASC > FY 2015 Projects ( Show direct descendants )

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Abstract: Restoration of degraded wet meadows found on upland valley floors has been proposed to achieve a range of ecological benefits, including augmenting late‐season streamflow. There are, however, few field and modelling studies documenting hydrologic changes following restoration that can be used to validate this expectation, and published changes in groundwater levels and streamflow following restoration are inconclusive. Here, we assess the streamflow benefit that can be obtained by wet‐meadow restoration using a physically based quantitative analysis. This framework employs a 1‐dimensional linearized Boussinesq equation with a superimposed solution for changes in storage due to groundwater upwelling and...
Abstract (from Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation): The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to map and monitor the environment has increased sharply in the last few years. Many individuals and organizations have purchased consumer‐grade UAVs, and commonly acquire aerial photographs to map land cover. The resulting ultra‐high‐resolution (sub‐decimeter‐resolution) imagery has high information content, but automating the extraction of this information to create accurate, wall‐to‐wall land‐cover maps is quite difficult. We introduce image‐processing workflows that are based on open‐source software and can be used to create land‐cover maps from ultra‐high‐resolution aerial imagery. We compared four machine‐learning...
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...
Beaver-related restoration is a process-based strategy that seeks to address wide-ranging ecological objectives by reestablishing dam building in degraded stream systems. Although the beaver-related restoration has broad appeal, especially in water-limited systems, its effectiveness is not yet well documented. In this article, we present a process-expectation framework that links beaver-related restoration tactics to commonly expected outcomes by identifying the set of process pathways that must occur to achieve those expected outcomes. We explore the contingency implicit within this framework using social and biophysical data from project and research sites. This analysis reveals that outcomes are often predicated...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425716302619): Groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) rely on near-surface groundwater. These systems are receiving more attention with rising air temperature, prolonged drought, and where groundwater pumping captures natural groundwater discharge for anthropogenic use. Phreatophyte shrublands, meadows, and riparian areas are GDEs that provide critical habitat for many sensitive species, especially in arid and semi-arid environments. While GDEs are vital for ecosystem services and function, their long-term (i.e. ~ 30 years) spatial and temporal variability is poorly understood with respect to local and regional scale climate, groundwater, and...
The closure assumption of many abundance models, that individual animals are present throughout the survey season, often is inconsistent with field data. The effects of closure-assumption violations on estimators of abundance and associations between abundance and covariates are not fully understood. Furthermore, one’s definition of abundance affects these estimates. We used simulated data on breeding birds to explore how permanent, non-random immigration and emigration that violate the closure assumption affect estimates from N-mixture abundance models and naïve models (models that do not account for imperfect detection). This is the first work to evaluate the effect of permanent immigration and emigration on estimates...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing natural resource management. The disruptions it is causing require that we change how we consider and implement conservation and resource management in order to ensure the future of habitats, species, and human communities, whether that means adopting new management actions or adjusting the ways in which existing actions are implemented. However, practitioners often struggle with how to identify and prioritize specific climate adaptation actions, which are taken to either increase/enhance resilience or decrease vulnerability in a changing climate. Management actions may have a higher probability of being successful if they are informed by available scientific...
Depressional wetlands in the Columbia Plateau are valuable habitats because they maintain surface water into or throughout the dry summers. The source of that moisture—surface runoff from surrounding areas, or groundwater in local aquifers—may determine if these wetlands are seasonal, permanent, or semi-permanent. Helping these wetlands continue to provide habitat and other services requires understanding how these flooding and drying patterns (their hydrology) have changed in the past, and how projected changes in climate might affect them. The goal of this project was to develop wall-to-wall maps of wetlands across the region, coupled with detailed 30-year hydrographs of historical (1984-2014) fluctuations in...
The past decade has seen a rapid rise in beaver-related stream restoration (BRR) using beavers and beaver dams (real or artificial) as a tool. Potential benefits of this low-cost, nature-based restoration approach include restoring aquatic and riparian habitat and recovering of threatened species dependent on it, improving water availability and stream flow regulation, reducing erosion and stream incision, and supporting climate change adaptation. Although the ecological restoration literature acknowledges the importance of addressing the human dimensions of restoration, there is a gap regarding the human dimensions of BRR. To help fill this gap we examined six projects involving riparian revegetation or artificial...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JF003789/abstract): A module to simulate glacier runoff, PRMSglacier, was added to PRMS (Precipitation Runoff Modeling System), a distributed-parameter, physical-process hydrological simulation code. The extension does not require extensive on-glacier measurements or computational expense but still relies on physical principles over empirical relations as much as is feasible while maintaining model usability. PRMSglacier is validated on two basins in Alaska, Wolverine, and Gulkana Glacier basin, which have been studied since 1966 and have a substantial amount of data with which to test model performance over a long period of time covering a wide range...
The large, highly glacierized Copper River basin is an important water resource for the south‐central region of Alaska. Thus, information is needed on the reaction of its hydrologic timing and streamflow volumes to historical changes in climate, in order to assess the possible impact of future changes. However, the basin is remote, and therefore, it has proved difficult to collect field data in a frequent temporal and spatial manner. An extension of the distributed‐parameter, physical‐process code Precipitation Runoff Modeling System, PRMSglacier, has been specifically developed to simulate daily hydrology without requiring extensive input data. In this study, PRMSglacier was used to characterize the hydrology of...
The annual Northwest Climate Conference is the region's premier opportunity for a cross-disciplinary exchange of knowledge and ideas relating to climate impacts and adaptation. The conference brings together hundreds of researchers, resource managers and policy makers from academia, public agencies, sovereign tribal nations, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector, to share the latest climate science, challenges to infrastructure, industry, environment and communities, and adaptive solutions. The conference also provides a forum for scientist, manager, and practitioner collaboration and discussion of emerging challenges, policy and management objectives, and information needs related to regional climate...
The Integrated Scenarios (IS) of the Future Northwest Environment project resulted in several datasets describing projected changes in climate, hydrology and vegetation for the 21st century over the Northwestern US. At the conclusion of the IS project in August 2014, it was recognized that many data users would be challenged to use the IS data due to 1) the sheer size of these datasets (~ 20 Terabytes of data), 2) the specific file format (netCDF) of the IS data, and 3) the unfamiliarity of appropriate methods for analyzing climate scenarios. To address these issues, the Integrated Scenarios Tools project was funded with the aim of creating a website for the IS project focusing on providing: 1) information on and...
The increasing threat of drought to the productivity of US rangelands is a socioeconomic and ecological problem that needs pragmatic solutions. The urgency of this issue has fostered partnerships between private landowners and public natural resource managers to find solutions. The use of North American beaver (Castor canadensis) to increase surface water in arid landscapes is one pre-emptive measure that is gaining interest because of the remarkable ability of beavers to impound water. In places where beaver are no longer present, some landowners and managers are installing artificial structures made of rock and wood with the intention of mimicking effects of beaver dams. Although this ecosystem engineering is...
Abstract (from SpringerLink): Poor condition of many streams and concerns about future droughts in the arid and semi-arid western USA have motivated novel restoration strategies aimed at accelerating recovery and increasing water resources. Translocation of beavers into formerly occupied habitats, restoration activities encouraging beaver recolonization, and instream structures mimicking the effects of beaver dams are restoration alternatives that have recently gained popularity because of their potential socioeconomic and ecological benefits. However, beaver dams and dam-like structures also harbor a history of social conflict. Hence, we identified a need to assess the use of beaver-related restoration projects...