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National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) along the East Coast of the United States protect habitat for a host of wildlife species, while also offering storm surge protection, improving water quality, supporting nurseries for commercially important fish and shellfish, and providing recreation opportunities for coastal communities. Yet in the last century, coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by human development activities as well as sea-level rise and more frequent extreme events related to climate change. These influences threaten the ability of NWRs to protect our nation’s natural resources and to sustain their many beneficial services. Through this project, researchers are collaborating with...
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In the northern Gulf of Mexico, mangrove forests have been expanding their northern range limits in parts of Texas, Louisiana, and north Florida since 1989. In response to warming winter temperatures, mangroves, which are dominant in warmer climates, are expected to continue migrating northward at the expense of salt marshes, which fare better in cooler climates. The ecological implications and timing of mangrove expansion is not well understood, and coastal wetland managers need information and tools that will enable them to identify and forecast the ecological impacts of this shift from salt marsh to mangrove-dominated coastal ecosystems. To address this need, researchers will host workshops and leverage existing...
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The Pacific Ocean is home to a number of low-lying, coastal national parks and wildlife refuges. These public lands are situated on coral reef-lined islands that are susceptible to inundation from sea-level rise and flooding during storms. Because of their low-lying nature and limited availability of space, ecosystems, cultural resources, and infrastructure on these islands are particularly vulnerable to flooding. Sea-level rise will further exacerbate the impact of storms on island parks and refuges by increasing wave-driven coastal flooding, with consequences for ecological and human communities alike. However, most assessments of future conditions at coastal national parks and refuges consider only permanent...
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The distribution and abundance of cheatgrass, an invasive annual grass native to Eurasia, has increased substantially across the Intermountain West, including the Great Basin. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, and as it has expanded, the extent and frequency of fire in the Great Basin has increased by as much as 200%. These changes in fire regimes are associated with loss of the native sagebrush, grasses, and herbaceous flowering plants that provide habitat for many native animals, including Greater Sage-Grouse. Changes in vegetation and fire management have been suggested with the intent of conserving Greater Sage-Grouse. However, the potential responses of other sensitive-status birds to these changes in management...
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Natural resource managers consistently identify invasive species as one of the biggest challenges for ecological adaptation to climate change. Yet climate change is often not considered during their management decision making. Given the many ways that invasive species and climate change will interact, such as changing fire regimes and facilitating the migration of high priority species, it is more critical than ever to integrate climate adaptation science and natural resource management. The coupling of climate adaptation and invasive species management remains limited by a lack of information, personnel, and funding. Those working on ecological adaptation to climate change have reported that information is not...
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Wildfires are a natural occurrence in interior Alaska’s boreal forest. There is extreme variability in the severity of the wildfire season in this region. A single year in which more than one million acres of forest burns can be followed by several years of low to moderate fire activity. In addition, fires in high latitude zones appear to be responding to changes in climate. Warmer temperatures rapidly cure understory fuels, such as fast-drying beds of mosses, lichens, and shrubs, which lie beneath highly flammable conifer trees. Managing such variability is challenging in light of both changing climate conditions and the fact that planning activities require sufficient advance warning. The goal of this project...
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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...
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Climate change is already affecting ecosystems, and will likely trigger significant and permanent changes in both ecological and human communities. Such transformations are already occurring in the Arctic region of Alaska, where temperatures are warming at twice the global average and causing some ecosystems to transition to new states. Arctic warming has led to coastal erosion that has forced human communities to relocate and a loss of sea ice that has forced marine mammals, such as polar bears and walrus, to adapt to a more terrestrial mode of living. Meanwhile, in the Great Plains of the U.S., past interactions between land and water use during the Dust Bowl and recent high rates of depletion of the Ogallala...
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In the Northwest U.S., warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will likely result in significantly altered snowpack, stream flows, and water availability. Along with these changes comes an increased risk of “ecological drought”, or periods of water stress that impact ecosystems and the services they provide –which can ultimately impact human communities. More frequent and severe ecological droughts have the potential to push ecosystems beyond their ability to recover, resulting in complete changes in ecosystem composition and function. Ecological drought will only worsen existing management challenges, such as competition for water resources, habitat degradation, invasive species, and more frequent...
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The western coast of Alaska is a remote region, rich in wildlife and providing critical nesting habitat for many of Alaska’s seabirds. It is also home to indigenous communities who rely upon the region’s natural resources to support a traditional lifestyle of hunting, gathering, and fishing. Although the region is frequently subject to extensive inland flooding from Bering Sea storms, little is known about the extent and frequency of flooding and its impacts on vegetation, wildlife, and water quality. Furthermore, information is lacking about how climate change and sea-level rise (which can influence the frequency and intensity of storms and subsequent flooding) are affecting this area, its communities, and their...
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Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing natural resource management. The disruptions it is causing require that we change the way we consider conservation and resource management in order to ensure the future of habitats, species, and human communities. Practitioners often struggle with how to identify and prioritize specific climate adaptation actions (CAAs). Management actions may have a higher probability of being successful if they are informed by available scientific knowledge and findings; a systematic review process provides a mechanism to scientifically assess management questions. By evaluating specific actions on scientific knowledge and findings, we may be able to increase management...
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Forests across the southwestern U.S. are crucial components of recreation and play an important role in state and local economies. Healthy forests also provide needed habitat for many wildlife species and contribute many other important services to our planet. “Hotter droughts” (otherwise normal droughts whose effects on ecosystems are exacerbated by higher temperatures) are an emerging climate change threat to forests with some of their earliest and strongest appearances happening in the Southwest. The Leaf to Landscape project uses California’s unusually hot drought as a potential preview of the future, allowing us to collect information that will help guide forest management in the face of a warming climate....
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The Department of the Interior Climate Science Centers (CSCs) and their managing organization, the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, have chosen the emerging climate science field of Ecological Drought as a research focus area. This workshop is part of a series of meetings at each of the nation’s eight CSCs aimed at collating our existing knowledge of the ecological impacts, resistance, and recovery from drought. The eight CSCs provide a fantastic opportunity to compare the ecological effects of drought, related research activities, and management options at different regions, spatial scales, and biomes of drought, related research activities, and management options...
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California’s Central Valley is a nexus for water resources in the state, draining the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds. Urban centers, agricultural operations, and the environment all compete for limited water, and demand is expected to only increase as the population grows and agriculture intensifies. At the same time, the water supply is projected to decrease as temperatures rise, precipitation patterns change, and the frequency of extreme droughts increases. The Central Valley also provides critical wetland habitats to migratory waterbirds, and wetland managers require information on how to best use water resources to support wildlife objectives, particularly during drought. This project seeks to...
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The Rio Grande River is a critical source of freshwater for 13 million people in Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico. More than half of the Rio Grande’s streamflow originates as snowmelt in Colorado’s mountains, meaning that changes in the amount of snowmelt can impact the water supply for communities along the entire river. Snowmelt runoff is therefore an important component of water supply outlooks for the region, which are used by a variety of stakeholders to anticipate water availability in the springtime. It is critical that these water supply outlooks be as accurate as possible. Errors can cost states millions of dollars due to mis-allocation of water and lost agricultural productivity. There is a perception...
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Wildfires scorched 10 million acres across the United States in 2015, and for the first time on record, wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion. Wildfire danger modeling is an important tool for understanding when and where wildfires will occur, and recent work by our team in the South Central United States has shown wildfire danger models may be improved by incorporating soil moisture information. Advancements in wildfire danger modeling may increase wildfire preparedness, and therefore decrease loss of life, property, and habitat due to wildfire. Still, soil moisture—an important determinant of wildfire risk—is not currently used for wildfire danger assessments because data are generally unavailable at the...
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The climate of the North Central U.S. is driven by a combination of factors, including atmospheric circulation patterns, the region’s complex topography which extends from the High Rockies to the Great Plains, and variations in hydrology. Together, these factors determine the sustainability of the region’s ecosystems and the services that they provide communities. In order to understand the vulnerability of the region’s ecosystems to change, it is necessary to have reliable projections of future climate conditions. To address this need, researchers first examined past and present variations in climate and assessed the ability of climate models to effectively project future climate conditions for the region. Second,...
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Haleakalā National Park (HNP) and the surrounding landscape spans many different land cover types, some of which are undergoing vegetation changes that can reduce the amount of water that infiltrates into soil. Decreased soil infiltration can lead to the erosion of terrestrial habitats, increases in the amount of sediment entering aquatic habitats, and flooding of downstream areas as runoff increases after storms. Currently, HNP managers are attempting to control runoff and erosion to avoid loss and damage within park boundaries and parks located downstream. Managers in HNP have expressed a need for information on current and future runoff and erosion risk to help prioritize management within the park and other...
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American Samoa is vulnerable to sea-level rise in part due to the steep terrain of its islands. This terrain requires the majority of the islands’ villages and infrastructure to be located along thin strips of coastal land. The situation is worsened by the recently recognized rapid sinking of the islands, which was triggered by the 2009 Samoa earthquake and is predicted to last for decades. This subsidence is estimated to lead to roughly twice as much sea-level rise by 2060 as what is already predicted from climate change alone. As a result, the timeline of coastal impacts in American Samoa will be decades ahead of similar island communities in the Pacific. Despite this urgency, decision-makers in the region lack...
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that low-lying atolls (ring-shaped islands or island chains made of coral) in the Pacific Ocean are extremely vulnerable to high tide events (“king tides”), storm surge, tsunamis, and sea-level rise. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) spreads over 29 atolls and has a population of over 50,000 people with homes and communities that may be threatened by these climate change-related events. Policy makers, planners, and others within RMI are faced with decisions about how to prepare for the future and need scientific data and information about the vulnerability of Pacific Islands to potential climate change impacts like sea-level rise. Topographic and bathymetric...
map background search result map search result map Modeling Future Storm Impacts on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta Understanding Extreme Climate Events in the North Central U.S. TopoWx ("Topographical Weather/Climate") temperature dataset tile grid The Available Science Assessment Process (ASAP): Evaluating the Science behind Climate Adaptation Actions Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges Relations Among Cheatgrass, Fire, Climate, and Sensitive-Status Birds across the Great Basin The Impact of Drought on Waterbirds and Their Wetland Habitats in California’s Central Valley Alaska EcoDrought Synthesis Workshop Newsletter, September 2015 Collecting Elevation Data to Understand Climate Change Effects in the Marshall Islands Leaf to Landscape: Understanding and Mapping the Vulnerability of Forests to Hotter Droughts Developing Tools for Improved Water Supply Forecasting in the Rio Grande Headwaters Wildfire Probability Mapping Based on Regional Soil Moisture Models Extremes to Ex-Streams: Informing Ecological Drought Adaptation in the Northwest Projecting Future Wildfire Activity in Alaska’s Boreal Forest Identifying the Risk of Runoff and Erosion in Hawaiʻi’s National Parks Identifying the Ecological and Management Implications of Mangrove Migration in the Northern Gulf of Mexico Adaptation Strategies in the Face of Climate-Driven Ecological Transformation: Case Studies from Arctic Alaska and the U.S. Great Plains The Impact of Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise on Future Flooding of Coastal Parks and Refuges in Hawaiʻi and the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands Creating a North Central Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (NC RISCC) Management Network Sea-Level Rise Viewer for American Samoa: A Co-Developed Visualization and Planning Tool Collecting Elevation Data to Understand Climate Change Effects in the Marshall Islands Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges Leaf to Landscape: Understanding and Mapping the Vulnerability of Forests to Hotter Droughts Modeling Future Storm Impacts on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta Sea-Level Rise Viewer for American Samoa: A Co-Developed Visualization and Planning Tool The Impact of Drought on Waterbirds and Their Wetland Habitats in California’s Central Valley The Available Science Assessment Process (ASAP): Evaluating the Science behind Climate Adaptation Actions Extremes to Ex-Streams: Informing Ecological Drought Adaptation in the Northwest Relations Among Cheatgrass, Fire, Climate, and Sensitive-Status Birds across the Great Basin Projecting Future Wildfire Activity in Alaska’s Boreal Forest Wildfire Probability Mapping Based on Regional Soil Moisture Models Identifying the Risk of Runoff and Erosion in Hawaiʻi’s National Parks Understanding Extreme Climate Events in the North Central U.S. Creating a North Central Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (NC RISCC) Management Network Identifying the Ecological and Management Implications of Mangrove Migration in the Northern Gulf of Mexico TopoWx ("Topographical Weather/Climate") temperature dataset tile grid Adaptation Strategies in the Face of Climate-Driven Ecological Transformation: Case Studies from Arctic Alaska and the U.S. Great Plains The Impact of Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise on Future Flooding of Coastal Parks and Refuges in Hawaiʻi and the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands Alaska EcoDrought Synthesis Workshop Newsletter, September 2015