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As our world changes and communities are faced with uncertain future climate conditions, decision making and resource planning efforts can often no longer rely on historic scientific data alone. Scientific projections of what might be expected in the future are increasingly needed across the country and around the world. Scientists and researchers can develop these projections by using computer models to simulate complex elements of our climate and their interactions with ecosystems, wildlife, and biodiversity. While an extensive array of general circulation models (GCMs, climate models of the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean) exist, there is currently a lack of global biodiversity models. This project...
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Communities, resource managers, and decision makers in Arctic Alaska are in need of scientific information to base important decisions related to anticipating and adapting to changes in temperature and precipitation. Since its inception in 2011, the Alaska Climate Science Center (AK CSC) and its partners have produced a variety of scientific products and datasets aimed at supporting this need and increasing climate change resilience in the Arctic. However, much of the information related to these activities is dispersed across many technical publications, and is often not readily accessible to those outside the research community. In an effort to make this science more available and accessible, the AK CSC is working...
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The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) spreads over 29 atolls and has a population of over 50,000 people; over 27,000 of those people live on the Majuro Atoll, RMI’s capital. Sea level rise threatens the very existence of RMI as high-end projections of sea level rise by the end of the century exceed the average elevation of these low atoll reef islands. Already, waves wash over Majuro during “king tides” when strong winds blow from the west across the broad lagoon, or when there are high open ocean waves. Flooding waves breach island shores in multiple locations and wash into homes, cemeteries, across roads, and into commercial districts. Over the past decade, there has been a widespread exodus of residents...
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The Red River Stakeholder Engagement project’s primary objective was to uncover areas of concern for stakeholders who live, work, and play along the Red River Basin. It examined the complexity of the cultural-geographic landscape across the Red River Basin. By focusing on both the geographic and the cultural, we gain a better understanding of how individuals, communities, and organizations interact with the basin and with one another, how they are currently experiencing changes, and what they perceive a changing climate means for them. This cultural-geographic approach recognizes that stakeholders’ concerns, priorities, and actions likely vary across space-and also vary in their cultural significance. For example,...
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This layer represents the lakes in the Crown of the Continent with a 50km buffer. This layer has been produced by merging the "WATERBODY_2" shapefiles from relevant NHN folders obtained from GeoBase - National Hydro Network (NHN) for Canada within the CCE and the "NHDWaterbody" shapefile for Montana, US. This dataset was developed by the Crown Managers Partnership, as part of a transboundary collaborative management initiative for the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, based on commonly identified management priorities that are relevant at the landscape scale. The CMP is collaborative group of land managers, scientists, and stakeholder in the CCE. For more information on the CMP and its collaborators, programs,...
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A large portion of the U.S. population lives in coastal areas along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Caribbean; however, our coasts are also home to many fish, wildlife, and plant species that are important for recreation, tourism, local economies, biodiversity, and healthy coastal ecosystems. Coastal habitats also provide protective ecosystem services to human communities, which are increasingly at risk to storms and sea level rise under future climate change. Understanding how climate change will impact natural and human communities is a crucial part of decision making and management related to the protection of our coasts. In a collaborative project between the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative...
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In Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, snow plays a crucial role in atmospheric and hydrologic systems and has a major influence on the health and function of regional ecosystems. Warming temperatures may have a significant impact on snow and may therefore affect the entire water cycle of the region. A decrease in precipitation in the form of snow, or “snow drought”, can manifest in several ways including changes to total snowfall amounts, snow accumulation, and the timing/length of the snow season. Understanding these changes is then critical for understanding and predicting a variety of climate impacts to wildlife and ecosystems. However, little research has been conducted to date to understand how this change may...
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Land-use researchers need the ability to rapidly compare multiple land-use scenarios over a range of spatial and temporal scales, and to visualize spatial and nonspatial data; however, land-use datasets are often distributed in the form of large tabular files and spatial files. These formats are not ideal for the way land-use researchers interact with and share these datasets. The size of these land-use datasets can quickly balloon in size. For example, land-use simulations for the Pacific Northwest, at 1-kilometer resolution, across 20 Monte Carlo realizations, can produce over 17,000 tabular and spatial outputs. A more robust management strategy is to store scenario-based, land-use datasets within a generalized...
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As resource managers, policy makers, and citizens grapple with the effects of climate change, the demand for more usable or “actionable” science has increased. One promising approach to developing scientific information that can be easily and readily applied to management and policy decisions is to have scientists and decision makers work together to produce information. This approach, often referred to as the “co-production of knowledge”, integrates the background, experience, and know-how of each group to develop the scientific information that will be most useful to society. This project will test an approach to knowledge co-production by introducing a trained social scientist to a co-produced drought-related...
Wetland soils are vital to the Nation because of their role in sustaining water resources, supporting critical ecosystems, and sequestering significant concentrations of biologically-produced carbon. The United States has the world’s most detailed continent-scale digital datasets for soils and wetlands, yet scientists and land managers have long struggled with the challenge of integrating these datasets for applications in research and in resource assessment and management. The difficulties include spatial and temporal uncertainties, inconsistencies among data sources, and inherent structural complexities of the datasets. This project’s objective was to develop and document a set of methods to impute wetland...
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Large amounts of data are being generated that require hours, days, or even weeks to analyze using traditional computing resources. Innovative solutions must be implemented to analyze the data in a reasonable timeframe. The program HTCondor (https://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/) takes advantage of the processing capacity of individual desktop computers and dedicated computing resources as a single, unified pool. This unified pool of computing resources allows HTCondor to quickly process large amounts of data by breaking the data into smaller tasks distributed across many computers. This project team implemented HTCondor at the USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center (UMESC) to leverage existing computing...
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The Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Connectivity Collaborative (AHC Collaborative) is working to develop best practices for aquatic connectivity project selection. Over the past decade, a suite of spatial desktop decision support tools has been developed for the Great Lakes region to aid in planning and selection of barrier (i.e. culverts or dams impeding aquatic organism passage) removal or rehabilitation. These tools are, for the most part, under-utilized by decision makers, likely because they do not know the tools exist, where to find them, how to use them, or how they perform in supporting “real life” decisions. We propose to examine the performance of both local, empirical data sets and existing decision support...
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We will work with Landscape Conservation Cooperative partners to (1) edge match the Oklahoma and Texas Ecological Systems (ECS) data sets, (2) complete an enduring features (ecological site type; geophysical setting) data set for Oklahoma, (3) create a process for up-dating the ECS data set by detecting land cover change and modeling the revised ECS types, and (4) collect field data to characterize grassland composition in the Texas panhandle and adjacent Oklahoma. MoRAP staff will complete the first three tasks by leveraging knowledge, skills, and data on-hand from earlier work on the statewide ECS data sets. Staff from Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation...
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Flow alteration – from new and existing water supply projects, increased urbanization, and drought conditions – is a pervasive threat to aquatic wildlife throughout the Gulf Coast Prairie region. One species susceptible to this threat is Guadalupe Bass, an economically and ecologically important black bass species endemic to Texas. The area encompassing their range is projected to experience some of the highest population growth in Texas, placing increased demands on the aquifers and watersheds of this region. A previous GCP LCC Instream Flow project conducted by the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership (SARP) produced hypotheses about instream flow requirements of native aquatic species that need to be tested....
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Climate change, drought, habitat alterations, and increasing water demands are leaving less water available for streams of the Pacific Northwest and for fish like salmon. As water levels drop, some small streams become fragmented, transforming from a ribbon of continuous habitat into a series of isolated pools. Fragmented streams may pose a serious threat to salmon. For example, juveniles that become stranded in small pools are at increased risk to overheat, starve, or be consumed by predators. Healthy salmon populations can cope with fragmentation and recover from a bad drought-year. However, many salmon populations are endangered and face long-term drought. Land and resource managers are increasingly finding...
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Climate change impacts on water resources in the Pacific Northwest are predicted to have transformational effects on agriculture. Loss of winter snow pack, reduced summer stream flows, and increased summer temperatures are all phenomena that have already been observed, and are expected to worsen over this century. Research is ongoing in the Northwest to understand agriculture practices that might allow farmers to prepare for these climate change impacts. One potential technique is the use of biochars (charcoal made from decomposition of organic matter at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen), which can be used as a soil amendment that can increase soil moisture retention, improve agricultural yields, and hold...
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As temperature and precipitation patterns change, different species in different areas will be affected in different ways. Some places may serve as refuges for wildlife—places where animals can remain or to which they can easily move to escape the worst impacts of climate change. This project will establish a Refugia Research Coalition to leverage recently funded Northwest CASC research projects on the topic of ecological refugia. The goal of this collaborative effort will be to synthesize our understanding of ecological refugia in the Pacific Northwest and how best to use refugia-related research products as tools for adaptive management planning in the region. Ecological refugia will be an important means of protecting...
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The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) and the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) seek to enhance scientific understanding of how climate trends and variability are linked to phenology across spatial scales, with the ultimate goal of being able to understand and predict climate impacts on natural resources. A key step towards achieving this long-term goal is connecting local observations (individual plants or animals) of phenology with those at regional to continental scales (10 km to 10,000 km), which may ultimately be used to better understand phenology across ecosystems and landscapes and thereby inform natural resource management. The specific shorter-term goals of this effort are to process...
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The USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC) is currently engaged in an Ecological Drought initiative, focused on understanding the impacts of drought on natural ecosystems across the country. This project was designed to support the Ecological Drought initiative by creating a USGS EcoDrought Actionable Science Working Group. The goal of this working group was to identify science needs for drought-related decisions and to provide natural resource managers with practical strategies for adapting to and planning for drought. The working group engaged social scientists to garner advice on relevant social science research questions and data needs, as well as to identify any regulatory, institutional,...
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Preparing for and responding to drought requires integrating scientific information into complex decision making processes. In recognition of this challenge, regional drought early warning systems (DEWS) and related drought-information tools have been developed under the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). Despite the existence of many tools and information sources, however, the factors that influence if a tool(s) is (are) used, which tools are used, and how much benefit those tools provide remain poorly understood. Using the Upper Colorado River DEWS as a case study, this study investigated how water, land, and fire managers select from among many available tools. The Upper Colorado River Basin...
map background search result map search result map Guadalupe Bass flow-ecology relationships; with emphasis on the impact of flow on recruitment Lakes in the Crown of the Continent Identifying Critical Thresholds and Tipping Points for Priority Coastal Species in a Changing Future Evaluating the Effectiveness of Assisted Migration and Fish Rescue Programs Assessing the Use of Biochar for Drought Resilience and Crop Productivity Producing Usable Science: Testing the Effectiveness of Stakeholder Engagement in Climate Research Eco-drought Actionable Science Working Group Connecting Advanced Land Cover for Improved Biological Planning and Conservation Design A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Arctic Alaska Snow Drought: Recognizing and Understanding its Impacts in Alaska Workshops and Collaborations to Improve Biodiversity and Climate Modeling Simulating and Projecting Future Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Majuro Atoll Comparison of Decision Making Techniques for Selection of River Connectivity Projects in the Michigan Fruitbelt Red River Basin Stakeholder Engagement How and Why Upper Colorado River Basin Land, Water, and Fire Managers Choose to Use Drought Tools Establishing a Refugia Research Coalition (RRC) for Collaborative Refugia-Related Research and Management in the Pacific Northwest Incorporating USGS Web Cameras into the Phenocam Network to Enhance Scientific Understanding of Phenological Trends and Variability Simulating and Projecting Future Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Majuro Atoll Guadalupe Bass flow-ecology relationships; with emphasis on the impact of flow on recruitment How and Why Upper Colorado River Basin Land, Water, and Fire Managers Choose to Use Drought Tools Evaluating the Effectiveness of Assisted Migration and Fish Rescue Programs Lakes in the Crown of the Continent Connecting Advanced Land Cover for Improved Biological Planning and Conservation Design Red River Basin Stakeholder Engagement Establishing a Refugia Research Coalition (RRC) for Collaborative Refugia-Related Research and Management in the Pacific Northwest Assessing the Use of Biochar for Drought Resilience and Crop Productivity Producing Usable Science: Testing the Effectiveness of Stakeholder Engagement in Climate Research Identifying Critical Thresholds and Tipping Points for Priority Coastal Species in a Changing Future A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Arctic Alaska Snow Drought: Recognizing and Understanding its Impacts in Alaska Eco-drought Actionable Science Working Group Incorporating USGS Web Cameras into the Phenocam Network to Enhance Scientific Understanding of Phenological Trends and Variability Workshops and Collaborations to Improve Biodiversity and Climate Modeling