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Ecosystems experience stress from a number of factors, but a changing climate exacerbates those stressors and alters ecosystem and soil productivity, leading to degradation of wildlife habitat and agricultural productivity. Response to these enhanced stressors requires that farmers, ranchers, and wildlife managers have the necessary information and resources to guide adaptive management decisions. Not only do they need better forecasts of drought severity, but also an understanding of the likely effects of drought on vegetation and soil at the decadal scale. To provide these resources, this project proposes to document and map climate change vulnerability of major grasslands and wetlands on the southern Great Plains...
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Floods and droughts are forecasted to occur with greater frequency and to be more extreme because of climate change. These changes will increase stresses on both cities and natural systems. Increased flooding can harm infrastructure designed to support human needs and natural systems that support fish and wildlife. Increased drought can have direct impacts on fish and wildlife by increasing river and lake temperatures and stranding species in water-short systems. This project will develop a decision support system that helps resource managers in New England estimate the recurrence of future extreme floods and droughts while directly incorporating the impacts of future climate change. The decision support system...
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Water temperature plays a large role in freshwater ecosystems in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. It affects the physical and biological features of rivers, like how the water interacts with the landscape and the life cycles of organisms that live in the river. For example, unseasonably warm water temperatures in Alaska’s large rivers in 2019 caused large numbers of salmon to die before they could reach their spawning grounds. Though water temperature data is important for natural resources monitoring programs, these data are historically lacking and hard to collect for large river systems. Satellites and other remote sensing techniques can offer valuable insight to Alaskan stream conditions. They can measure thermal...
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In the last decade, the annual area burned by wildfires in Alaska has doubled relative to any of the previous four decades, and the current frequency of fire is unprecedented over the past 1,200 years. Wildland fires are one of the main contributors to long-term changes in the structure and function of boreal and subarctic ecosystems. Although fire is a necessary component of regulating these ecosystems, it also poses a hazard to humans when uncontrolled. Currently, fire managers use the Fire Behavior Prediction Calculator to perform calculations that can assist in field management of fires, but the only version of this tool that is available depends on network access, which poses a significant limitation for...
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Continued sea-level rise from a changing climate is expected to result in the loss of many coastal mangrove trees, which, will strongly affect human populations on isolated Western Pacific islands as they rely heavily on mangrove forests for food (fish, shrimp, and crabs), building materials, and firewood. Mangroves also protect local communities from tsunamis and cyclones and are important for climate change mitigation because they remove and store large amounts of atmospheric CO2 in trees and sediments. Mangroves have kept up with sea-level rise in the past by building up their forest floor elevations relative to sea level through tree root growth and accumulation of sediments delivered by adjacent rivers or oceans....
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Fish and Wildlife agencies across the United States are currently revising their State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs). These documents are important planning documents over 10 year timescales. SWAP Coordinators have been challenged to incorporate climate change impacts and species responses as part of their strategic approaches to managing vulnerable fish and wildlife resources. The Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center is assisting Northeast and Midwestern States meet this charge by developing a regional synthesis document that provides: 1) Regional and state-specific climate change projections for approximately twenty climate variables (e.g., air temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture,...
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This project compiled, synthesized, and communicated tailored climate change information to NE CASC stakeholders, including Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC), state and federal agencies, and tribal communities. Our mission is to make climate science actionable by getting to know our stakeholders and the decisions they face, and delivering climate information that is directly relevant to their decisions and priorities. The project team served as a resource to answer individual inquiries related to climate model projections in order to aid climate change adaptation. Additionally, the team contributed to the development of a synthesis document to help the Midwest and Northeast states prepare their threatened...
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Cherokee Peoples have had a sustained presence in the southern Appalachians over the past 12,000 years, with a peak population of about 250,000 people inhabiting approximately 32 million hectares across Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Early contact with European settlers caused drastic population declines and land loss, due to disease, land cession, and the relocation of people to western reservations. Today, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) comprises 16,000 citizens who maintain approximately 24,000 hectares of land known as the Qualla Boundary. The EBCI hold a distinct perspective informed by a multi-generational connection to place and to a collective...
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The Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CLCC) Steering Committee (SC) recently made two landmark decisions providing direction for collaborative conservation efforts. The SC agreed to pursue landscape conservation design (LCD) as a major emphasis of collaborative work and they agreed to adopt a values-focused, structured decision-making (SDM) process to guide conservation design development and implementation for the CLCC. Developing both a strategic plan and an implementation approach using a values focused LCD framework was expected to have several advantages. This effort aimed to complement existing conservation efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands conducted by federal, state, and NGO...
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High elevation red spruce forests are among the most iconic and visited natural communities in the High Alleghenies of the Central Appalachian Mountains. These ecosystems provide many services such as clean water and carbon sequestration, as well as habitat for species of high conservation concern, i.e., the eastern brook trout, the northern goshawk, and the northern flying squirrel. However, widespread logging and burning in the early 20th century significantly reduced the extent and integrity of red spruce forests. Replacement regeneration largely converted the region to northern hardwood forests. Recovery of red spruce forests has since been slowed by invasive pests and acidic atmospheric deposition, and the...
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Wabanaki Tribal Nations (Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot) and other Tribal Nations in the Northeast CASC region will face a disproportionate impact from climate change. These impacts will affect resources such as forestry products, fish, game, wild crops, and water that are important to tribal economies and well-being. To combat this, varying levels of tribal community preparedness and the ability to build effective adaptive capacity to extreme events will be crucial for future resiliency efforts. Furthermore, there is a pressing need to work with partners who have a variety of backgrounds to plan, strategize, build and implement resiliency initiatives in tribal communities and identify innovative...
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Climate change poses a variety of threats to biodiversity. Most efforts to assess the likely impacts of climate change on biodiversity try to rank species based on their vulnerability under changed environmental conditions. These efforts have generally not considered the ability of organisms to adjust their phenotype to the changing environment. Organisms can do this by one of two ways. First, they can adjust their phenotype via non-evolutionary pathways. Second, they can undergo adaptive evolutionary change. We used two interconnected approaches to evaluate thermal adaptation capacity in a cold-water fish species. 1) Using tagging data, we estimated thermal performance curves for wild fish. The curves indicate...
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Residents living along the coast of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River have experienced two record-setting floods, one in 2017 and another in 2019. These floods caused tremendous property damage and disruptions to the regional economy. The water levels on Lake Ontario are influenced by the operations of the Moses Saunders Dam on the St. Lawrence River. These operations are determined by the International Joint Commission and are required to balance several competing objectives (e.g., navigation, flood control, recreational boating, hydropower). Recently, the International Joint Commission altered the operational plan to help restore coastal wetlands. The floods of 2017 and 2019 followed soon after, and...
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The ability to effectively manage wildlife in North America is founded in an understanding of how human actions and the environment influence wildlife populations. Current management practices are informed by 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 relationships we 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....
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Conservation and natural resource managers require information about potential future climate changes for the areas they manage, in terms that are relevant for the specific biotic and environmental resources likely to be affected by climate change. We produced a suite of data sets that provide managers with climate and climate-derived data and a visualization approach that allows managers to map where 1) a managed area's potential future climate is located on today's landscape (i.e., the locations of the modern analogues of future climate) and 2) the areas to which the present climate (and habitat) of managed areas are projected to move. We produced downscaled climate data from historical (1901-2000) data sets and...
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Florida is home to 50 endangered species, 23 National Wildlife Refuges, 9 national parks, and 119 state parks. Straddling both temperate and sub-tropical zones, the state is also unique in that it is a long and narrow peninsula, surrounded on three sides by warm water, creating a dynamic environment. The impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and severe storms, threaten the state’s unique biodiversity—yet managers are unsure how species will respond to these changes, which makes planning for the future difficult. In order to identify the impacts of climate change on Florida’s plants and wildlife, researchers developed regional climate scenarios identifying how temperature and precipitation patterns...
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If current climate change trends continue, rising sea levels could inundate low-lying islands across the globe. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) is a group of islands of great conservation importance that is threatened by sea-level rise. Stretching 2,000 km beyond the main Hawaiian Islands, the NWHI are a World Heritage Site and part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. The islands support the largest tropical seabird rookery in the world, providing breeding habitat for 21 species of seabirds, 4 land bird species, and essential habitat for other resident and migratory wildlife. Because these are low-lying islands, even small increases in sea-level could result in the loss of critical habitat,...
Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2009, Baby Brooks Bank, Bank 66, Birds, Birds, All tags...
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The antelope-like pronghorn is the fastest land animal in North America and has the longest land migration in the continental U.S—in fact, the species has been dubbed “the true marathoners of the American West”. While pronghorns are numerous in parts of their range, such as Wyoming and northern Colorado, they are endangered in others, such as the Sonoran Desert. In the arid Southwest, pronghorn populations have been declining since the 1980s—and it’s thought that drought is partially to blame. Average temperatures in the Southwest have increased 1.6°C since 1901, and the area affected by drought from 2001-2010 was the second largest observed since 1901. Drought conditions have reduced the availability of vegetation,...
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This project produced long simulations (multi-decadal to multi-century in scale) of past, present, and future regional climate at a grid spacing of 50 kilometers (km) over North America and at a grid spacing of 15 km over western and eastern North America. These model runs were the first attempt to achieve coordinated, high-resolution downscaling with such wide geographic and temporal coverage. The objectives of this project were to (1) understand the nature of climate change and variability, (2) quantify the climate-driven responses and feedbacks of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, wildfire, the hydrologic cycle, and alpine glaciers, and (3) provide climate information in a form that is useful to a wide range...
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Information about streamflow and streamflow variability is critical to assist natural resource managers when they make decisions related to the water needs of both human communities and ecosystems. In order for managers to effectively plan for and adapt to future climate and land cover conditions, they require information on changes that could occur in the distribution and quantity of water resources. Yet every watershed has a unique set of characteristics – such as differing topographies and geology – that affect how much water is available, the sources of water, and how it flows through the system. This means that water availability in every watershed can be affected differently by changes in climate and land...
map background search result map search result map How will Florida’s Biodiversity Respond to Climate Change? Predicting the Risk of Species Extinctions Due to Sea-Level Rise in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands A Visualization Approach for Projecting Future Climate Distributions in North America Downscaled Climate Change Modeling for the Conterminous United States (National Assessment) The Effects of Drought on Southwestern Pronghorns Can Wildlife Species Evolve in Response to a Changing Climate? Informing Species Vulnerability Assessments Supporting Strategic Landscape Conservation Decisions in the U.S. Caribbean Assessment of Water Availability and Streamflow Characteristics in the Southeastern U.S. for Current and Future Climatic and Landscape Conditions Climate Assessments and Scenario Planning (CLASP) A Decision Support System for Estimating Changes in Extreme Floods and Droughts in the Northeast U.S. Informing Management of Waterfowl Harvest in a Changing Climate Dynamic Climate Adaptation for Wetland Restoration and Coastal Communities on Lake Ontario Assessing Vulnerability of Species and Ecosystems in the South Central United States to Inform Adaptation Strategies Designing Tools and Networks to Support Wabanaki Adaptive Capacity for Climate Change Integrating Climate Change into the State Wildlife Action Plans A Mobile Fire Behavior Prediction Calculator to Inform Fire Management in Alaska Developing a Pacific Mangrove Monitoring Network (PACMAN) in Response to Sea Level Rise Compilation of Historical Water Temperature Data for Large Rivers in Alaska using the Landsat Satellite Archive The Long View: Developing a 500-year Climate Adaptation Plan with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Using the Virginia Northern Flying Squirrel to Guide Resilient Restoration of Red Spruce in the Central Appalachians How will Florida’s Biodiversity Respond to Climate Change? Dynamic Climate Adaptation for Wetland Restoration and Coastal Communities on Lake Ontario A Decision Support System for Estimating Changes in Extreme Floods and Droughts in the Northeast U.S. Supporting Strategic Landscape Conservation Decisions in the U.S. Caribbean Using the Virginia Northern Flying Squirrel to Guide Resilient Restoration of Red Spruce in the Central Appalachians Predicting the Risk of Species Extinctions Due to Sea-Level Rise in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands The Long View: Developing a 500-year Climate Adaptation Plan with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Assessing Vulnerability of Species and Ecosystems in the South Central United States to Inform Adaptation Strategies Designing Tools and Networks to Support Wabanaki Adaptive Capacity for Climate Change The Effects of Drought on Southwestern Pronghorns Can Wildlife Species Evolve in Response to a Changing Climate? Informing Species Vulnerability Assessments Climate Assessments and Scenario Planning (CLASP) Integrating Climate Change into the State Wildlife Action Plans Informing Management of Waterfowl Harvest in a Changing Climate Assessment of Water Availability and Streamflow Characteristics in the Southeastern U.S. for Current and Future Climatic and Landscape Conditions A Mobile Fire Behavior Prediction Calculator to Inform Fire Management in Alaska Compilation of Historical Water Temperature Data for Large Rivers in Alaska using the Landsat Satellite Archive Downscaled Climate Change Modeling for the Conterminous United States (National Assessment) Developing a Pacific Mangrove Monitoring Network (PACMAN) in Response to Sea Level Rise A Visualization Approach for Projecting Future Climate Distributions in North America