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The global mean surface temperature increased 0.85°C during the period 1880 – 2012. Some climate models predict an additional warming of up 2 to 4 ◦ C over the next 100 years for the primary breeding grounds for North American ducks. Such an increase has been predicted to reduce mid - continent breeding duck populations by >70%. Managing continental duck populations in the face of climate change requires understanding how waterfowl have responded to historical spatio - temporal climatic variation. However, such responses to climate may be obscured by how ducks respond to variation in land cover. We estimated effects of climate on settlement patterns of breeding ducks in the Prairie - Parkland Region (PPR), boreal...
Severe droughts cause widespread tree mortality and decreased growth in forests across the globe. Forest managers are seeking strategies to increase forest resistance (minimizing negative impacts during the drought) and resilience (maximizing recovery rates following drought). Limited experimental evidence suggests that forests with particular structural characteristics have greater capacity to resist change and or recover ecosystem function in the face of drought. However, the applicability of these results to practical forest conservation and management remains unclear. This project utilized an existing network of eight long-term, operational-scale, forest management experiments from Arizona to Maine to examine...
The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in nearly 100 parks, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to be responsive and adaptive to future climate change. As a step toward developing a process to address this need, this project worked with Dinosaur National Monument to consider climate change in its grazing management planning process. In this project, we convened researchers, managers, subject-matter experts, and climate change adaptation specialists through a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to develop and apply a small set of challenging,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Report
The responses of individual species to environmental changes can be manifested at multiple levels that range from individual-level (i.e., behavioral responses) to population-level (i.e., demographic) impacts. Major environmental changes that ultimately result in population level impacts are often first detected as individual-level responses. For example, herbivores respond to limited forage availability during drought periods by increasing the duration of foraging periods and expanding home range areas to compensate for the reduction in forage. However, if the individual-level responses are not sufficient to compensate for reduced forage availability, reduced survival and reproductive rates may result. We studied...
America’s remaining grassland in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is at risk of being lost to crop production. When crop prices are high, like the historically high corn prices that the U.S. experienced between 2008 and 2014, the risk of grassland conversion is even higher. Changing climate will add uncertainties to any efforts toward conservation of grassland in the PPR. Grassland conversion to cropland in the region would imperil nesting waterfowl among other species and further impair water quality in the Mississippi watershed. In this project, we sought to contribute to the understanding of land conversion in the PPR with the aim to better target the use of public and private funds allocated toward incentivizing...
Time and money for conservation are limited, so there is a need for responsible investments that embrace the realities of climate change. Droughts, floods, wildfires, hotter temperatures, declining snowpack, and changing streamflow are already significantly affecting wildlife and their habitats. In some cases, managers may decide to make strategic adjustments in how their actions are designed, where those actions are located, and when actions are needed most, in order to achieve management goals. A key part of making these forward-looking decisions is having access to climate information that can be integrated into an agency’s decision-making process. When science is conducted without an understanding of how that...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Report
Recent extreme floods on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers have motivated expansion of floodplain conservation lands. Within Missouri there are more than 85,000 acres of public conservation lands in large-river floodplains. Floodplain lands are highly dynamic and challenging to manage, particularly as future climatic conditions may be highly variable. These lands have the potential to provide valuable ecosystem services like provision of habitat, nutrient processing, carbon sequestration, and flood-water storage that produce economic values in terms of recreational spending, improved water quality, and decreased flood hazards. However, floodplain managers may need tools to help them understand nonstationary conditions...
The Marshall Islands Climate and Migration Project studies the multicausal nature of Marshallese migration, as well as its effects on migrants themselves and on home communities (van der Geest et al., 2019). It does so through people-centred research, seeking the views of Marshallese migrants and their relatives in the Marshall Islands. The research has a special focus on how impacts of climate change affect ecosystem services, livelihoods and migration decisions. This policy brief highlights key findings of the migration component of the research. It presents data and findings on migration patterns, drivers and impacts. It ends with a discussion of the results, with a focus on the tension between being prepared...
The responses of individual species to environmental changes can be manifested at multiple levels that range from individual-level (i.e., behavioral responses) to population-level (i.e., demographic) impacts. Major environmental changes that ultimately result in population level impacts are often first detected as individual-level responses. For example, herbivores respond to limited forage availability during drought periods by increasing the duration of foraging periods and expanding home range areas to compensate for the reduction in forage. However, if the individual-level responses are not sufficient to compensate for reduced forage availability, reduced survival and reproductive rates may result. We studied...
We conducted a workshop for tribes in the north central region who are in some stage of climate adaptation planning or implementation. This was a partnership between Colorado State University, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and ITEP (Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals) Climate Change Program. We built upon ITEPs climate adaptation training and tailored it to the specific needs of tribes in the region. We originally planned to develop the next iteration (“2.0”) of ITEP training to help tribes who need support with their plans and implementing their plans. However, upon surveying the tribes in the region, we quickly learned that there was a wide range of development along a spectrum from...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Report
Southwestern Colorado is already experiencing the effects of climate change in the form of larger and more severe wildfires, prolonged severe droughts, tree mortality from insect outbreaks, and earlier snowmelt. Climate scientists expect the region to experience more frequent summer heat waves, longer-lasting and more frequent droughts, and decreased river flow in the future (Lukas et al. 2014). These changes will ultimately impact local communities and challenge natural resource managers in allocating water and range for livestock grazing under unpredictable drought conditions, managing forests in the face of changing fire regimes, and managing threatened species under shifting ecological conditions. Considering...
The responses of individual species to environmental changes can be manifested at multiple levels that range from individual-level (i.e., behavioral responses) to population-level (i.e., demographic) impacts. Major environmental changes that ultimately result in population level impacts are often first detected as individual-level responses. For example, herbivores respond to limited forage availability during drought periods by increasing the duration of foraging periods and expanding home range areas to compensate for the reduction in forage. However, if the individual-level responses are not sufficient to compensate for reduced forage availability, reduced survival and reproductive rates may result. We studied...
Ungulate populations across the West have adapted to specific patterns in forage quantity, quality, and timing that ultimately influence the number of animals. We assessed potential for climate change to affect forage quality and availability for ungulates in the West. First, we evaluated multiple satellite remote sensing datasets and found that in some parts of the western U.S., growing season dates have shifted by over 30 days. We found agreement in the direction of recent trends in growing season dates across ~60% of the West. Substantial shifts in vegetation timing can have outsized effects on the wildlife that depend on matching migration timing to spring green up. For example, migrating mule deer follow the...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Report
The “Reconnecting Floodplains and Restoring Green Space as a Management Strategy to Minimize Risk and Increase Resilience in the Context of Climate and Landscape Change” project explores green infrastructure opportunities to manage flows, connections, and watersheds in order to improve both flood protection and ecosystem services. This project’s research specifically investigates how restoring floodplains would impact human welfare and environmental conservation. Its research objectives are addressed in two parts: 1) developing a hydraulic model to illustrate how changes in floodplain management may impact flooding along the Connecticut River, and 2) developing a geo-spatial model that demonstrates the distribution...
The responses of individual species to environmental changes can be manifested at multiple levels that range from individual-level (i.e., behavioral responses) to population-level (i.e., demographic) impacts. Major environmental changes that ultimately result in population level impacts are often first detected as individual-level responses. For example, herbivores respond to limited forage availability during drought periods by increasing the duration of foraging periods and expanding home range areas to compensate for the reduction in forage. However, if the individual-level responses are not sufficient to compensate for reduced forage availability, reduced survival and reproductive rates may result. We studied...
The NE CASC boasts an interdisciplinary array of scientists, from ecologists to biologists, hydrologists to climatologists, each contributing new, original academic research to advance our understanding of the impacts of climate change on wildlife and other natural resources in the Northeast. Needed was an outreach specialist who would interface directly with the management agencies who benefited from this research to aid the integration of this research into their management planning as part of adapting to climate change. A climatologist was preferred to address queries about climate modeling, climate change uncertainties, and other areas of climate science outside the expertise of NE CASC ecologists, biologists,...
Rates of climate and land use change vary across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains as do the responses of ecosystems to these changes. Knowledge of locations of rapid land use and climate change and changes in ecosystem services such as water runoff and ecological productivity are important for vulnerability assessment and crafting locally relevant adaptation strategies to cope with these changes. This project assessed the loss of public, private, and tribal lands due to ongoing land use intensifications and fragmentation extents across the NC CSC domain. In addition, the project evaluated how the climate, ecosystem processes, and vegetation have shifted over the past half century and how they are projected to...
Tribal nations are at the forefront of adaptation to climate change in the United States, because of their reliance upon the natural environment to sustain traditional ways of life yet the current lack of training and resources to respond to climate change impacts remains a challenge. Working with the South Central Climate Science Center (SC CSC), our team of climate scientists and anthropologists worked with tribal professionals in Louisiana and New Mexico to increase their basic knowledge of climate science, connect them with tools to assess their communities’ vulnerabilities, and helped them build their skills to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies. Our team held biweekly conference calls in consultation...
Changing climate conditions can make water management planning and drought preparedness decisions more complicated than ever before. Federal and State natural resource managers can no longer rely solely on historical trends as a baseline and thus are in need of science that is relevant to their specific needs to inform important planning decisions. Questions remain, however, regarding the most effective and efficient methods for extending scientific knowledge and products into management and decision-making. This project analyzed two unique cases of water management to better understand how science can be translated into resource management actions and decision-making, focusing particularly on how the context of...