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Within the time frame of the longevity of tree species, climate change will change faster than the ability of natural tree migration. Migration lags may result in reduced productivity and reduced diversity in forests under current management and climate change. We evaluated the efficacy of planting climate-suitable tree species (CSP), those tree species with current or historic distributions immediately south of a focal landscape, to maintain or increase aboveground biomass, productivity, and species and functional diversity. We modeled forest change with the LANDIS-II forest simulation model for 100 years (2000–2100) at a 2-ha cell resolution and five-year time steps within two landscapes in the Great Lakes region...
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Full life-cycle vulnerability assessments are identifying the effects of climate change on nongame migratory birds that are of conservation concern and breed in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region. Full life-cycle analyses are critical, as current efforts likely underestimate the vulnerability of migratory land birds due to a focus on assessing only one component of the annual cycle. The approach provides a framework for integrating exposure to climate changes, sensitivity to these changes, and the potential for adaptation in both winter and summer seasons, and accounts for carry-over effects from one season to another. The results of this work will inform regional management by highlighting both local and...
Great Lakes fishery managers and stakeholders have little information regarding how climate change could affect the management of recreationally and commercially important fisheries, which have been valued at more than $7 billion USD annually. Our research focused on how climate change could influence fish habitat (including water temperature, ice cover, and water levels), phytoplankton production that supports fish biomass, and ultimately the growth and consumption of many important recreational and commercial fish species. This final report was produced for the NCCWSC-funded project Forecasting Climate Change Induced Effects on Recreational and Commercial Fish Populations in the Great Lakes.
This paper introduces the analyses of the potential impacts of climate change on the city of Chicago and the Great Lakes region and potential response options that provide the basis for this special issue. Covering projected changes in climate and hydrology, this collection of studies first estimates the potential impacts of climate change on human health, natural ecosystems, water resources, energy, and infrastructure in the city of Chicago and the surrounding Great Lakes region. A consistent set of future climate projections have been used as the basis for each analysis, which together provide a vivid impression of the consequences likely to result under the SRES higher (A1FI) as compared to the lower (B1) emission...
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Within the time frame of the longevity of tree species, climate change will change faster than the ability of natural tree migration. Migration lags may result in reduced productivity and reduced diversity in forests under current management and climate change. We evaluated the efficacy of planting climate-suitable tree species (CSP), those tree species with current or historic distributions immediately south of a focal landscape, to maintain or increase aboveground biomass, productivity, and species and functional diversity. We modeled forest change with the LANDIS-II forest simulation model for 100 years (2000–2100) at a 2-ha cell resolution and five-year time steps within two landscapes in the Great Lakes region...
Abstract (from http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abstract/10.1139/cjfas-2014-0517#.VSwd3Y7F8qZ): Seasonal degradation of aquatic habitats from hypoxia occurs in numerous freshwater and coastal marine systems and can result in direct mortality or displacement of fish. Yet, fishery landings from these systems are frequently unresponsive to changes in the severity and extent of hypoxia, and population-scale effects have been difficult to measure except in extreme hypoxic conditions with hypoxia-sensitive species. We investigated fine-scale temporal and spatial variability in dissolved oxygen in Lake Erie as it related to fish distribution and catch efficiencies of both active (bottom trawls) and passive (trap nets)...
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Comprehensive wetland inventories are an essential tool for wetland management, but developing and maintaining an inventory is expensive and technically challenging. Funding for these efforts has also been problematic. Here we describe a large-area application of a semi-automated processused to update a wetland inventory for east-central Minnesota. The original inventory for this area was the product of a laborintensive, manual photo-interpretation process. The present application incorporated high resolution, multi-spectral imagery from multiple seasons; high resolution elevation data derived from lidar; satellite radar imagery; and other GIS data. Map production combined image segmentation and random forest classification...
Daily VEMAP output from the Hadley Coupled Climate Model (HadCM2) and land use projections from the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments are used to examine the impacts of climate change and land use change on a regional watershed in southeastern lower Michigan. The precipitation, temperature, moisture, and solar radiation output from HadCM2 are processed before they are used as input to a modified version of the Biosphere-Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS). The modified BATS model (BATS/HYDRO) includes the original 18 BATS land use types along with six new urban land classes as well as an improved surface runoff model, which accounts for impervious surfaces and depression storage. The daily VEMAP output...
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Conservation planning aims to optimize outcomes for select species or ecosystems by directing resources toward high-return sites. The possibility that local benefits might be increased by directing resources beyond the focal area is rarely considered. We present a case study of restoring river connectivity for migratory fish of the Great Lakes Basin by removing dams and road crossings within municipal jurisdictions versus their broader watersheds. We found that greater river connectivity could often be achieved by considering both intra-jurisdictional and extra-jurisdictional barriers. Focusing on jurisdictional barriers alone generally forfeited <20 (median = 0%) of habitat gains for those who value solely habitat...
Projections of regional climate, net basin supply (NBS), and water levels are developed for the mid- and late twenty-first century across the Laurentian Great Lakes basin. Two state-of-the-art global climate models (GCMs) are dynamically downscaled using a regional climate model (RCM) interactively coupled to a one-dimensional lake model, and then a hydrologic routing model is forced with time series of perturbed NBS. The dynamical downscaling and coupling with a lake model to represent the Great Lakes create added value beyond the parent GCM in terms of simulated seasonal cycles of temperature, precipitation, and surface fluxes. However, limitations related to this rudimentary treatment of the Great Lakes result...
This study is part of an assessment of potential effects of climate change on the St. Lawrence Great Lakes. Its purpose is to investigate potential future lake mixing patterns and primary production. Nested physical and biological models were applied to seasonal mixed layer depth, heat content, primary productivity, and to algal biomass measured as particulate chlorophyll. Two independent second generation General Circulation Models provided scenarios for future conditions of cloud cover, air temperature, humidity, and winds. The climate variables were used to force heat balance and surface mixed layer models for Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Physical models of heat balance and mixed layer...
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There is mounting concern that climate change will lead to the collapse of cyclic population dynamics, yet the influence of climate variability on population cycling remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that variability in survival and fecundity, driven by climate variability at different points in the life cycle, scales up from local populations to drive regional characteristics of population cycling and spatial synchronization.
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Our goal was to predict road culvert passability, as defined by culvert outlet drop and outlet water velocity, for three fish swimming groups using remotely collected environmental variables that have been shown to influence the passability of road culverts.We generated four boosted regression tree models, one for road culvert outlet drop and one each for the three culvert outlet water velocities, and predicted the probability of impassable road culverts on low-order streams based on the models. Independent variables in the modelsincluded the upstream area draining to the culvert, slope at the culvert, stream segment gradient and stream reach gradient.Gradient of the stream segment was the most important predictor...
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Northern Great Lakes forests represent an ecotone in the boreal–temperate transition zone and are expected to change dramatically with climate change. Managers are increasingly seeking adaptation strategies to manage these forests. We explored the efficacy of two alternative management scenarios compared with business-as-usual (BAU) management: expanding forest reserves meant to preserve forest identity and increase resistance, and modified silviculture meant to preserve forest function and increase adaptive capacity. Our study landscapes encompassed northeastern Minnesota and northern Lower Michigan, which are predicted to experience significant changes in a future climate and represent a gradient of latitude,...
Developing indicators of ecosystem condition is a priority in the Great Lakes, but little is known about appropriate spatial scales to characterize disturbance or response for most indicators. We surveyed birds, fish, amphibians, aquatic macroinvertebrates, wetland vegetation, and diatoms at 276 coastal wetland locations throughout the U.S. Great Lakes coastal region during 2002–2004. We assessed the responsiveness of 66 candidate indicators to human disturbance (agriculture, urban development, and point source contaminants) characterized at multiple spatial scales (100, 500, 1,000, and 5,000 m buffers and whole watersheds) using classification and regression tree analysis (CART). Nonstressor covariables (lake,...
We present water quality data from 58 coastal wetlands, sampled as part of a larger effort investigating effects of nutrient enrichment and habitat disruption in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Our sampling design selected sites from across a gradient of agricultural intensity within combinations of biogeographic ecoprovince and wetland hydromorphic type and captured a large range in water quality. Levels of total nutrients (N and P), and various measures of particulate concentration, water clarity, and ionic strength were strongly associated with agricultural intensity in the watershed, and could be effectively aggregated into an overall principal component-based water quality descriptor. Lake Erie wetlands had the...
The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), a physically-based watershed-scale model, holds promise as a means to predict tributary sediment and nutrient loads to the Laurentian Great Lakes. In the present study, model performance is compared across six watersheds draining into Lake Erie to determine the applicability of SWAT to watersheds of differing characteristics. After initial model parameterization, the Huron, Raisin, Maumee, Sandusky, Cuyahoga, and Grand SWAT models were calibrated (1998–2001) and confirmed, or validated (2002–2005), individually for stream water discharge, sediment loads, and nutrient loads (total P, soluble reactive P, total N, and nitrate) based on available datasets. SWAT effectively...
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A key challenge in aquatic restoration efforts is documenting locations where ecological connectivity is disrupted in water bodies that are dammed or crossed by roads (road crossings). To prioritize actions aimed at restoring connectivity, we argue that there is a need for systematic inventories of these potential barriers at regional and national scales. Here, we address this limitation for the North American Great Lakes basin by compiling the best available spatial data on the locations of dams and road crossings. Our spatial database documents 38 times as many road crossings as dams in the Great Lakes basin, and case studies indicate that, on average, only 36% of road crossings in the area are fully passable...
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Developing conservation strategies for threatened species increasingly requires understanding vulnerabilities to climate change, in terms of both demographic sensitivities to climatic and other environmental factors, and exposure to variability in those factors over time and space. Weconducted a range-wide, spatially explicit climate change vulnerability assessment for Eastern Massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus), a declining endemic species in a region showing strong environmental change. Using active season and winter adult survival estimates derived from 17 data sets throughout the species’ range, we identified demographic sensitivities to winter drought, maximum precipitation during the summer, and the proportion...
Abstract (from http://forestry.oxfordjournals.org/content/87/5/629.abstract): The contribution of understorey vegetation (UVEG) to forest ecosystem biomass and carbon (C) across diverse forest types has, to date, eluded quantification at regional and national scales. Efforts to quantify UVEG C have been limited to field-intensive studies or broad-scale modelling approaches lacking field measurements. Although large-scale inventories of UVEG C are not common, species- and community-level inventories of vegetation structure are available and may prove useful in quantifying UVEG C stocks. This analysis developed a general framework for estimating UVEG C stocks by employing per cent cover estimates of UVEG from a region-wide...
map background search result map search result map Publication: Restoring aquatic ecosystem connectivity requires expanding inventories of both dams and road crossings Publication: Predicting road culvert passability for migratory fishes Publication: Local-Scale Benefits of River Connectivity Restoration Planning Beyond Jurisdictional Boundaries Publication: A blind spot in climate change Publication: Climate variability drives population cycling and synchrony Publication: Demographic consequences of climate change and land cover help explain a history of extirpations and range contraction in a declining snake species Publication: A Semi-Automated, Multi-Source Data Fusion Update of aWetland Inventory for East-Central Minnesota Publication: Measuring and managing resistance and resilience under climate change in northern Great Lake forests Publication: Climate change effects on northern Great Lake (USA) forests: A case for preserving diversity Publication: Effects of alternative forest management on biomass and species diversity in the face of climate change in the northern Great Lakes region Publication: A Semi-Automated, Multi-Source Data Fusion Update of aWetland Inventory for East-Central Minnesota Publication: Measuring and managing resistance and resilience under climate change in northern Great Lake forests Publication: Climate change effects on northern Great Lake (USA) forests: A case for preserving diversity Publication: Effects of alternative forest management on biomass and species diversity in the face of climate change in the northern Great Lakes region Publication: Restoring aquatic ecosystem connectivity requires expanding inventories of both dams and road crossings Publication: Predicting road culvert passability for migratory fishes Publication: Local-Scale Benefits of River Connectivity Restoration Planning Beyond Jurisdictional Boundaries Publication: A blind spot in climate change Publication: Climate variability drives population cycling and synchrony Publication: Demographic consequences of climate change and land cover help explain a history of extirpations and range contraction in a declining snake species