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In recent decades, average temperatures across the U.S. Southwest have increased substantially and precipitation patterns have increased in variability. The warmer temperatures directly impact water availability within Southwest ecosystems, including earlier snowmelts; reduced snowpacks, soil moisture, and streamflow; and lower humidity. Collectively, this has led to an increase in aridity across this region. This in turn affects terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, increases wildfire severity, and impacts human activities such as agriculture and municipal water use. These well-documented trends are at the forefront of the concerns of natural resource managers in the Southwest. This project aims to strengthen partnerships...
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Stream flow is directly tied to climate, and numerous studies provide substantial evidence that climate change is a threat to future aquatic water flow processes. In the southwestern United States, mountain snow is a primary water source for streams and rivers. However, climate change is threatening the region's mountain snow, leading to reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelt, and more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow. These effects can change the timing, quality, and amount of water flowing in aquatic systems, creating challenges for natural resource managers. The goal of the proposed project is to synthesize existing research and management plans to identify misalignments between aquatic flows and the...
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The Pueblo de San Ildefonso is facing increased wildfire risk under climate change. Recent fires have not only burned culturally significant sites, but they have also resulted in a loss of watershed runoff retention, which has increased erosion and the transport of contaminated sediments and soils on Pueblo lands from the adjacent Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). A priority for the Pueblo is to ensure that wildfires are managed appropriately and, when large fires do occur, that effective measures are taken to control the aftermath of increased flooding and erosion. This project will build on the knowledge of elders and the community to develop a study plan (or study method) to evaluate different landscape...
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Stomatal closure during periods of moisture deficiency should theoretically lead to elevated 13C/12C ratios as reduction of available CO2 leads to diminished photosynthetic discrimination against 13C in favor of 12C. Stable-carbon isotope ratio chronologies developed from 5-yr tree-ring groups at 17 sites in six southwestern states were tested for a drought relationship by first fitting a spline curve to each chronology to remove the long-term trend and calculating indices as the ratio of actual to spline curve value. The time series of ?Del Indices? so developed are significantly correlated with 5-yr mean Palmer Hydrological Drought Indices (post-1930 period) and reconstructed July Palmer Drought Severity Indices...
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In California, the near-shore area where the ocean meets the land is a highly productive yet sensitive region that supports a wealth of wildlife, including several native bird species. These saltmarshes, mudflats, and shallow bays are not only critical for wildlife, but they also provide economic and recreational benefits to local communities. Today, sea-level rise, more frequent and stronger storms, saltwater intrusion, and warming water temperatures are among the threats that are altering these important habitats. To support future planning and conservation of California’s near-shore habitats, researchers examined current weather patterns, elevations, tides, and sediments at these sites to see how they affect...
Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2012, Bolinas Lagoon, CA, CASC, California, All tags...
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The Salt and Verde river basins in northeastern Arizona are a vital source of fresh water for the greater Phoenix metropolitan area and for two Native American tribes who rely on the basins’ natural resources for their livelihoods. The region depends on winter rain and snow to replenish the river basins’ water supply. Atmospheric rivers – long, narrow channels in the atmosphere that carry water vapor from the Pacific Ocean – supply a substantial portion of this winter precipitation. While atmospheric rivers are critical for maintaining water resources and preventing drought, they occasionally cause extreme storms that lead to flooding. Scientists project that climate change will affect the intensity and frequency...
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Ungulates, or hoofed mammals such as elk, deer, and moose, occupy a diversity of habitats across North America, from Canada’s high arctic to the deserts of Mexico. Ungulates play an important ecological role, helping to regulate processes such as nutrient cycling in forests and grasslands, through their grazing activities. They are also economically and culturally important, providing recreational and subsistence hunting opportunities and non-consumptive, aesthetic values. Yet throughout their range, ungulates face numerous anthropogenic and environmental threats that have the potential to impact populations and their ability to move across the landscape. Of these threats, an improved understanding of the effects...
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The Southwest is projected to face significant climate challenges in coming decades; and many of these stresses have already begun. In recent years, multiple climate assessments have been developed for the Southwest that corroborate forecasts of remarkable change to vegetation pattern and the vulnerability of regional ecosystems and suggest that measurable change is already ongoing. Disturbance events, particularly uncharacteristic fire, provide triggers for vegetation type conversions and new plant succession patterns. An understanding of post-fire forest recovery coupled with a synthesis of existing climate vulnerability research is needed to underpin and develop a regional climate adaptation strategy that assists...
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The goal of this project was to examine how temperature and precipitation could change by the mid 21st century over the greater Los Angeles region. Major findings for temperature are: (1) large variability in the magnitude exists among downscaled global climate model projections over LA, but all predict warming; (2) warming is smaller over the ocean and coastal zone, but larger in the mountain areas and inland; (3) ensemble mean warming in all parts of the domain is significantly outside the range of historical variability, meaning the change will be detectable. Major findings for precipitation are: (1) large variability in both sign and magnitude exists among downscaled global climate model precipitation projections...
This paper summarizes the current state of knowledge concerning the climate of the Southwest. Low annual precipitation, clear skies, and year-round warm weather over much of the Southwest are due in large part to a quasi-permanent subtropical high-pressure ridge over the region. However, the Southwest is located between the mid-latitude and subtropical atmospheric circulation regimes, and this positioning relative to shifts in these regimes is the fundamental reason for the region's climatic variability. El Nin?o, which is an increase in sea surface temperature of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean with an associated shift of the active center of atmospheric convection from the western to the central equatorial...
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Derived from the LANDFIRE Existing Vegetation data (http://www.landfire.gov/vegetation.php). This dataset has been resampled from the 30 m resolution of the source data to 300 m. The resampling was done using a majority filter so that cells in the new raster represent the most common type from the original raster. The main use for this dataset is in conjunction with Southwest Forest Vulnerability Index rasters, which contain the modeled vegetation exposure scores for several projected future climate scenarios. This raster can be used as an index of the vegetation type being modeled at each location.
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Changes in temperature and precipitation due to climate change (and associated droughts, wildfires, extreme storms etc.) threaten important water sources, forests, wildlife habitat, and ecosystems across the Southwest and throughout the entire U.S. These threats cross political and man-made boundaries and therefore need to be addressed at larger landscape-level and regional scales. “Landscape conservation design” is one method that can be used by land and resource managers to support large scale conservation and ensure that small scale and local actions contribute to a landscape level vision. The Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) is working to develop a shared vision for conservation action in the...
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Native Nations face unique challenges related to climate change. Native Americans have a deep connection to the natural environment within which their livelihoods, cultural identity, and spiritual practices are rooted. Changes to water flow and hydrology, landscapes, and ecosystems, in combination with socio-economic and other factors, amplify tribal vulnerabilities to climate change. In the Southwest, tribes are already experiencing a range of impacts that are at least partially related to climate change. They include serious water quality and supply issues in the context of prolonged drought; reduced ability to grow or collect important traditional crops and raw materials; loss of forest resources from large and...
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Despite the pandemic, Future of Fire postdoc Dr. Nina Fontana developed and contributed to a range of projects with cultural fire practitioners from 2021-2023. This funding will provide her an additional year to complete and grow projects started with partners as a Future of Fire fellow. Fontana’s work focuses on two broad areas: (1) improving best practices in teaching and learning about cultural fire, and (2) developing culturally relevant decision support tools to support cultural fire practitioners. Fontana will continue to develop and assess group experiential learning and practices that expand cultural fire education for different audiences. She will also continue her collaborations with tribal partners...
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In 2017, California was experiencing its most severe drought in over a millennia. Low rainfall and record high temperatures resulted in increased tree mortality and complete forest diebacks across the West. Though land managers scrambled to respond, they lacked information needed to make informed decisions. Focusing on California’s central and southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, this project seeks to determine whether a key forest management practice – forest thinning via prescribed fire – can help forests better survive drought. Prescribed fire is commonly used in the western U.S. to remove potential wildfire fuel, such as small trees and shrubs. It is also thought that this act of selectively removing trees helps...
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The Colorado River is a crucial water source for millions of people in the Southwest. Warming temperatures, clearly documented in climate records for the Colorado River basin, are having an impact on the amount of annual streamflow yielded from rain and snow. Recent work has revealed that warming temperatures have played an increasingly important role over the past decades, both exacerbating droughts and dampening the effects of wet winters on high stream flows. Understanding and anticipating how warming temperatures will influence future water supply in the Colorado River basin is increasingly important for resource management, particularly in light of recent drought conditions. The overarching goals of this...
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In California, the near-shore area where the ocean meets the land is a highly productive yet sensitive region that supports a wealth of wildlife, including several native bird species. These saltmarshes, mudflats, and shallow bays are not only critical for wildlife, but they also provide economic and recreational benefits to local communities. Today, sea-level rise, more frequent and stronger storms, saltwater intrusion, and warming water temperatures are among the threats that are altering these important habitats. Much of the existing research on anticipating the effects of changing conditions on coastal ecosystems relies on global or regional scale data, meaning that the detailed information necessary for local-scale...
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Fire in the western U.S. poses one of the greatest threats to human and ecological communities alike. In fact, fire management is the largest single expenditure of land management funds on federal lands. Now, climate change is altering wildfire patterns. Climate change in the West is creating warmer and drier conditions, resulting in an increase in the amount of dead vegetation available to fuel fires. This project sought to assess the vulnerability of forests in the southwestern U.S. to climate change and wildfire, in order to understand how these ecosystems might become altered as a result. Researchers (a) examined how climate change impacts wildfires in the region, to better understand fire risk; (b) identified...
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High-frequency observations of surface water at fine spatial scales are critical to effectively manage aquatic habitat, flood risk and water quality. We developed inundation algorithms for Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 across 12 sites within the conterminous United States (CONUS) covering >536,000 km2 and representing diverse hydrologic and vegetation landscapes. These algorithms were trained on data from 13,412 points spread throughout the 12 sites. Each scene in the 5-year (2017-2021) time series was classified into open water, vegetated water, and non-water at 20 m resolution using variables not only from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, but also variables derived from topographic and weather datasets. The Sentinel-1 model...
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Estuaries are located at the interface where rivers meet the sea, creating unique ecosystems with complex physical and biological processes. Coastal wetlands provide essential ecosystem services to people, including flood protection from high tides and storm surges, commercial fisheries, carbon sequestration, improved water quality, and wildlife food and habitat. Coastal wetlands are also home to hundreds of migratory and resident wildlife species including threatened and endangered species of management concern. Wetlands also have the unique ability to increase their elevation relative to sea-level rise, therefore protecting nearby communities from flooding. In California, prolonged drought and extreme storm events...
map background search result map search result map Drought indicated in carbon-13/carbon-12 ratios of southwestern tree rings The Vulnerability of Forests to Climate Change and Wildfire in the Southwestern U.S. Effects of Sea-Level Rise and Extreme Storms on California Coastal Habitats: Part 1 Effects of Sea-Level Rise and Extreme Storms on California Coastal Habitats: Part 2 Possible Future Changes to Water Resources in the Salt and Verde River Basins Associated with Atmospheric River Events Vegetation data for Southwest Forest Vulnerability Index Building Partnerships to Assess Tribal Adaptation to Climate Change and Science Needs in the Southwest Can Prescribed Fire Help Forests Survive Drought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains? Assessing Southwest Resources, Future Climate Scenarios, and Possible Adaptation Actions to Support Conservation Planning Anticipating Future Impacts of Temperature on Streamflow in the Colorado River Basin Climate Extremes and Ecological Impacts to California Estuaries Climate Change in the Los Angeles Region: Temperature and Precipitation Understanding the Effects of Climate Variability and Change on Ungulates in North America Actionable Science to Understand the Effects of Recent Temperature Increases to Inform Natural Resources Management in the Southwestern United States A Climate-Informed Adaptation and Post-Fire Strategy for the Southwestern Region Landscape Management Practices on the Pueblo de San Ildefonso Future of Aquatic Flows: Endangered streams: Understanding misalignments between aquatic flows and management strategies to inform adaptation efforts Data release for climate change impacts on surface water extents across the central United States Future of Fire Phase II: Learning by Doing with Cultural Fire Practitioners Landscape Management Practices on the Pueblo de San Ildefonso Climate Change in the Los Angeles Region: Temperature and Precipitation Possible Future Changes to Water Resources in the Salt and Verde River Basins Associated with Atmospheric River Events Can Prescribed Fire Help Forests Survive Drought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains? Anticipating Future Impacts of Temperature on Streamflow in the Colorado River Basin Effects of Sea-Level Rise and Extreme Storms on California Coastal Habitats: Part 1 Climate Extremes and Ecological Impacts to California Estuaries Effects of Sea-Level Rise and Extreme Storms on California Coastal Habitats: Part 2 Future of Fire Phase II: Learning by Doing with Cultural Fire Practitioners The Vulnerability of Forests to Climate Change and Wildfire in the Southwestern U.S. Future of Aquatic Flows: Endangered streams: Understanding misalignments between aquatic flows and management strategies to inform adaptation efforts A Climate-Informed Adaptation and Post-Fire Strategy for the Southwestern Region Data release for climate change impacts on surface water extents across the central United States Actionable Science to Understand the Effects of Recent Temperature Increases to Inform Natural Resources Management in the Southwestern United States Building Partnerships to Assess Tribal Adaptation to Climate Change and Science Needs in the Southwest Drought indicated in carbon-13/carbon-12 ratios of southwestern tree rings Vegetation data for Southwest Forest Vulnerability Index Assessing Southwest Resources, Future Climate Scenarios, and Possible Adaptation Actions to Support Conservation Planning Understanding the Effects of Climate Variability and Change on Ungulates in North America