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This resource is a series of reports describing the observed and projected changes in climate for states in the Northeast United States. States covered in this report include: Connecticut, Deleware, Massachusetts, Maryland-District of Columbia, Maine, New Hampshire, Jew Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and West Virginia. This information can be incorporated into state wildlife action plans (SWAPs).
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Overview Fishes of the Adirondack Park face numerous challenges. Summer Suckers are the only endemic vertebrate yet have suffered major range reductions, so we are analyzing their genome, body shape, and spawning timing to verify their uniqueness and current range. Warming patterns are expected to shift their spawning earlier, potentially intersecting with their recent ancestor (White Suckers) to create hybridization and reduced reproductive success. Minnows are more diverse in the Adirondacks, and our analyses suggest that they show three major distributional patterns that reflect post-glacial colonization and temperature preferences. We are analyzing data from hundreds of lakes to discern the rules that structure...
Abstract (from ESA Journals): Climate change is a well-documented driver and threat multiplier of infectious disease in wildlife populations. However, wildlife disease management and climate-change adaptation have largely operated in isolation. To improve conservation outcomes, we consider the role of climate adaptation in initiating or exacerbating the transmission and spread of wildlife disease and the deleterious effects thereof, as illustrated through several case studies. We offer insights into best practices for disease-smart adaptation, including a checklist of key factors for assessing disease risks early in the climate adaptation process. By assessing risk, incorporating uncertainty, planning for change,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This report provides an overview of the state of the science for climate impacts and adaptation options across the NEAFWA region and for Regional Species of Greatest Conservation Need (RSGCN) and associated habitats.
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Society makes substantial investments in federal, Tribal, state, and private programs to supplement populations of valued species such as stocking fish, planting trees, rebuilding oyster reefs, and restoring prairies. These important efforts require long-term commitment, but climate change is making environmental conditions less predictable and more challenging to navigate. Selection of species for population supplementation is often based on performance prior to release, and one or a few species may then be used for decades even as the environment is changing. When these species are propagated in large numbers, they can become the dominant population as well as genetically overtake any local adaptations. Therefore,...
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Current stormwater management infrastructure and strategies in the northeastern US are built around historical weather data and not the weather that is expected with climate change, like more frequent extreme rainfall. This matters because stormwater can introduce pollution to streams and can cause flooding. Researchers supported by this Northeast CASC project will combine climate data, stormwater models, and data about urban streams to provide actionable information for managers to identify effective adaptation strategies for stormwater to protect lake and stream ecosystems in the northeastern US. Stormwater, or rainfall that lands on rooftops and pavement and quickly drains away, transports pollution like excess...
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Studying the impacts of climate on important ecological responses is a recent priority of monitoring programs throughout the Northeast. Established sampling protocols for data collection, whether to inform estimates of species abundance or occupancy, were designed to evaluate the effects of non-climate stressors (e.g., habitat conversion) and related management actions. Traditional modeling approaches may not accurately identify important relationships between species and climate nor elicit useful information on how these species will be impacted by climate change. Management decisions based on these traditional modeling approaches could have negative and unintended consequences on species and habitat conservation....
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Prairies were once widespread across North America, but are now one of the most endangered and least protected ecosystems in the world. Agriculture and residential development have reduced once extensive prairies into a patchwork of remnant prairies and “surrogate” grasslands (e.g., hayfields, planted pastures). Grassland ecosystems and many grassland-dependent birds are also particularly vulnerable to rapid shifts in climate and associated changes in drought and extreme weather. The Central Flyway is a vast bird migration route that comprises more than half of the continental U.S., and extends from Central America to Canada, and harbors the greatest diversity of grassland birds in North America. Throughout this...
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The fast pace of change in coastal zones, the trillions of dollars of investment in human communities in coastal areas, and the myriad of ecosystem services natural coastal environments provide makes managing climate-related risks along coasts a massive challenge for all of the U.S. coastal states and territories. Answering questions about both the costs and the benefits of alternative adaptation strategies in the near term is critical to taxpayers, decision-makers, and to the biodiversity of the planet. There is significant public and private interest in using ecosystem based adaptation approaches to conserve critical significant ecosystems in coastal watersheds, estuaries and intertidal zones and to protect man-made...
Abstract (from Ecological Society of America): Successful management of natural resources requires local action that adapts to largerā€scale environmental changes in order to maintain populations within the safe operating space (SOS) of acceptable conditions. Here, we identify the boundaries of the SOS for a managed freshwater fishery in the first empirical test of the SOS concept applied to management of harvested resources. Walleye (Sander vitreus) are popular sport fish with declining populations in many North American lakes, and understanding the causes of and responding to these changes is a high priority for fisheries management. We evaluated the role of changing water clarity and temperature in the decline...
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The amount of water flowing through a stream is an important driver of aquatic habitat, but scientists don’t often measure streamflow in the small stream networks that feed larger rivers. Monitoring smaller streams is especially important as climate change is causing them to (a) flood more often and more intensely, and (b) lose habitat as drought events and water temperatures increase. A better understanding of the changing patterns of flow and temperatures in small streams can help decision makers evaluate which streams will provide suitable habitat for plants and animals under a changing climate. Specific goals of this project are to 1) understand how water flow and temperature interact in small streams and 2)...
Winter drawdown (WD) is a common lake management tool for multiple purposes such as flood control, aquatic vegetation reduction, and lake infrastructure maintenance. To minimize adverse impacts to a lake’s ecosystem, regulatory agencies may provide managers with general guidelines for drawdown and refill timing, drawdown magnitude, and outflow limitations. However, there is significant uncertainty associated with the potential to meet management targets due to variability in lake characteristics and hydrometeorology of each lake’s basin, making the use of modeling tools a necessity. In this context, we developed a hydrological modeling framework for lake water level drawdown management (HMF-Lake) and evaluated it...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) is an insect causing extensive hemlock tree die-offs in the northeast, and a lack of information on climate adaptation practices is hindering effective forest management. With the overall goal of fostering resilient forests that support northeastern hemlock ecosystems and wildlife, researchers supported by this Northeast-CASC project will work with land managers to identify information gaps and to develop management plans and a decision support tool tailored to the specific ecological, economic, and cultural management goals of different forests. The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) is an invasive insect that has caused extensive hemlock death from Georgia to Maine in many of the densest...
Aim Spatiotemporal variation in resource availability is a strong driver of animal distributions. In the northern hardwood and boreal forests of the northeastern United States, tree mast events provide resource pulses that drive the population dynamics of small mammals, including the American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), a primary songbird nest predator. This study sought to determine whether mast availability ameliorates their abiotic limits, enabling red squirrel elevational distributions to temporarily expand and negatively impact high-elevation songbirds. Location Northeastern United States. Methods We used two independent datasets to evaluate our hypotheses. First, we fit a dynamic occupancy model...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Climate change poses threats to forests, creating a need for adaptation to novel and changing conditions. This need has led to the creation of adaptation frameworks including the resistance, resilience, transition (RRT) framework, which proposes management strategies along a gradient of change and adaptation. Although management within this framework is grounded in theory and past management experience, little is known about how these approaches may influence regeneration, a critical phase in forest development. To address this gap, we examined five-year outcomes of treatments implemented using the RRT framework as part of the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change network in northern...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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The NE CASC Fellows Program is a training initiative to develop skills in engagement, communication, and collaboration to help inform climate change adaptation for natural and cultural resources management. Students and postdocs from the NE CASC consortium universities make up the fellows cohort and hail from diverse disciplines, including ecology, engineering, and earth and environmental sciences. Our common goal is to fulfill the mission of the NE CASC, which is to deliver science to help wildlife, ecosystems, and people adapt to a changing climate. Our challenge is to identify and build relationships with stakeholder partners to collaboratively design research that will meet their climate adaptation needs.
Our ability to effectively manage wildlife in North America is founded in an understanding of how our actions and the environment influence wildlife populations. Current practices use population monitoring data from the past to determine key ecological relationships and make predictions about future population status. In most cases, including the regulation of waterfowl hunting in North America, these forecasts assume that the environmental conditions observed in the past will remain the same in the future. However, climate change is influencing wildlife populations in many dynamic and uncertain ways, leading to a situation in which our observations of the past are poor predictors of the future. If we continue to...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Aim Preventing the spread of range-shifting invasive species is a top priority for mitigating the impacts of climate change. Invasive plants become abundant and cause negative impacts in only a fraction of their introduced ranges, yet projections of invasion risk are almost exclusively derived from models built using all non-native occurrences and neglect abundance information. Location Eastern USA. Methods We compiled abundance records for 144 invasive plant species from five major growth forms. We fit over 600 species distribution models based on occurrences of abundant plant populations, thus projecting which areas in the eastern United States (U.S.) will be most susceptible to invasion under current and +2°C...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Indigenous Nations are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, due in part to their reliance on healthy ecosystems to provide culturally significant plants that are used for traditional foods, medicines, and materials. Further, many Indigenous communities have an under-resourced capacity for climate adaptation, resulting in significant environmental justice impacts that range from health disparities to heightened disaster risks. There is growing recognition across the globe of the important role of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in climate change resilience and the innovative solutions that lie at the intersection of Indigenous and western knowledge. However, Indigenous knowledge has...
Abstract (from arXiv): This paper introduces a novel framework for combining scientific knowledge of physics-based models with neural networks to advance scientific discovery. This framework, termed as physics-guided neural network (PGNN), leverages the output of physics-based model simulations along with observational features to generate predictions using a neural network architecture. Further, this paper presents a novel framework for using physics-based loss functions in the learning objective of neural networks, to ensure that the model predictions not only show lower errors on the training set but are also scientifically consistent with the known physics on the unlabeled set. We illustrate the effectiveness...


map background search result map search result map Strategies for Reducing the Vulnerability of Grassland Birds to Climate Change within the Central Flyway Evaluating Ecosystem-Based Adaptation Options for Coastal Resilience Fellows Program Putting the Sampling Design to Work: Enhancing Species Monitoring Programs in the Face of Climate Change Climate-Adaptive Population Supplementation (CAPS) to Enhance Fishery and Forestry Outcomes Integrating Streamflow and Temperature to Identify Streams with Coldwater Refugia in the Northeast Indigenous-led Restoration and Stewardship of Culturally Significant Plants for Climate Change Adaptation in the Northeast Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking Designing Climate-Resilient Stormwater Management in Northeastern US Cities to Support Stream Ecosystems Climate-Adaptive Population Supplementation (CAPS) to Enhance Fishery and Forestry Outcomes Designing Climate-Resilient Stormwater Management in Northeastern US Cities to Support Stream Ecosystems Integrating Streamflow and Temperature to Identify Streams with Coldwater Refugia in the Northeast Putting the Sampling Design to Work: Enhancing Species Monitoring Programs in the Face of Climate Change Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking Fellows Program Indigenous-led Restoration and Stewardship of Culturally Significant Plants for Climate Change Adaptation in the Northeast Strategies for Reducing the Vulnerability of Grassland Birds to Climate Change within the Central Flyway Evaluating Ecosystem-Based Adaptation Options for Coastal Resilience