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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 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...
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In many places around the world, spring events, like warming temperatures, are coming earlier and fall events are coming later than they have in the past. These changes have implications for the phenology, or the timing of natural life events (e.g. the timing of plant flowering in Spring or leaves falling in Autumn), of many plant species. However, not all species and regions are changing at the same rate, which can lead to mismatches (e.g. between the emergence of plants and pollinators in early spring). Many interactions in nature depend on timing and, as such, phenology affects nearly all aspects of the environment, including the abundance, distribution, and diversity of organisms, ecosystem services, food webs,...
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 USGS National Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCASC) is currently engaged in an Ecological Drought initiative, focused on understanding the impacts of drought on natural ecosystems across the country. This project supported the Ecological Drought initiative by creating an Intermountain West Drought Social Science Synthesis Working Group. The goal of this working group was to investigate human dimensions of ecological drought across the intermountain west from a comparative, regional perspective. Throughout the Intermountain West, there has been significant investment in understanding how social factors influence manager and citizen experiences of drought in particular locations. Yet there is still a gap in...
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 North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Conservation Science Partners, Inc. (CSP) to systematically identify information gaps that, if addressed, would support management decisions for key species, habitats, or other issues within the North Central region (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas). In particular, we were interested in the intersection between 1) high-priority species or habitats that are 2) the subject of a planned decision, and for which 3) climate information would aid decision-making for state and federal agencies. In Spring of 2018, we interviewed state fish and wildlife managers...
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...
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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...
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...
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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...
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...
Understanding of the influence of global warming has been limited by a paucity of experiments. Taking advantage of the largest, longest-running experimental warming of a forest, we convened dozens of scientists from across the world to collect data to study and understand how bacteria, fungi, herbivores, plant pathogens, insects and a diversity of other groups respond to warming. We found that warming had a significant impact on ecosystems at both a site in North Carolina, as well as a more northern site in Massachusetts. The types of effects, however, differed between the north and south; they also differed as a function of the organisms considered. While warming affected all levels of organization, it had the...
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...
As part of a broader effort to increase the ability of federal agencies to understand and adapt to changes in climate variability and hazard profiles, the Colorado Bureau of Land Management has commissioned an on-going research effort to gather and analyze information on the potential climate-related vulnerabilities of the numerous communities and businesses that rely upon the state’s 8.4 million acres of BLM-managed public lands. This report contains the initial findings of this project, and details work conducted between 2015 and 2017 centered around three main questions: 1. What efforts are currently underway within the Colorado BLM to address changes in climate and the climate vulnerabilities of public land...
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...
map background search result map search result map 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 Understanding Changes to the Timing of Natural Events (Phenology) for Plants in the Water-Limited Southwest Anticipating Future Impacts of Temperature on Streamflow in the Colorado River Basin Understanding Changes to the Timing of Natural Events (Phenology) for Plants in the Water-Limited Southwest Assessing Southwest Resources, Future Climate Scenarios, and Possible Adaptation Actions to Support Conservation Planning