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We present a case-study evaluation of gillnet catches of Walleye Sander vitreus to assess potential effects of large-scale changes in Oneida Lake, New York, including disruption of trophic interactions by double-crested cormorants Phalacrocorax auritus and invasive dreissenid mussels. We used the empirical long-term gillnet time series and a negative binomial linear mixed model to partition variability into spatial and coherent temporal variance components, and we propose that variance partitioning can help quantify spatiotemporal variability and examine if variance structure differs before and after large-scale perturbation. Here, we found that average catch and total variability of catches decreased following...
This project consisted of two principal components: (1) A climatological analysis of burn conditions (2) A forum to discuss fire risk and management practices The climatological study included seasonality and inter-annual variability and potential changes due to increasing temperatures. The regional forum engaged stakeholders in a discussion of the use of prescribed fire in a safe and effective manner.
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Climate projections for the southern Great Plains, and elsewhere in the U.S., indicate that a hotter future with changes in precipitation amount and seasonality is to be expected. As plants become stressed from these changes, wildfire risk increases. One of the most valuable approaches to reducing the impacts of wildfires is fuel reduction through prescribed burns. Fuel reduction helps minimize the destruction of ecological communities, threats of future flooding, and extensive damages by lessening the intensity of future wildfires. Although safe burning practices can largely minimize the risks, prescribed burns may bring some degree of concern among practitioners. The real and perceived risks may include bodily...
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The distribution and abundance of cheatgrass, an invasive annual grass native to Eurasia, has increased substantially across the Intermountain West, including the Great Basin. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, and as it has expanded, the extent and frequency of fire in the Great Basin has increased by as much as 200%. These changes in fire regimes are associated with loss of the native sagebrush, grasses, and herbaceous flowering plants that provide habitat for many native animals, including Greater Sage-Grouse. Changes in vegetation and fire management have been suggested with the intent of conserving Greater Sage-Grouse. However, the potential responses of other sensitive-status birds to these changes in management...
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The sky island forests of the southwestern United States are one of the most diverse temperate forest ecosystems in the world, providing key habitat for migrating and residential species alike. Black bear, bighorn sheep, mule deer, and wild turkey are just a few of the species found in these isolated mountain ecosystems that rise out of the desert landscape. However, recent droughts have crippled these ecosystems, causing significant tree death. Climate predictions suggest that this region will only face hotter and drier conditions in the future, potentially stressing these ecosystems even further. Simple models predict that vegetation will move to cooler and wetter locations in response to this warming. However,...
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.10964/abstract): While the effects of land use change in urban areas have been widely examined, the combined effects of climate and land use change on the quality of urban and urbanizing streams have received much less attention. We describe a modelling framework that is applicable to the evaluation of potential changes in urban water quality and associated hydrologic changes in response to ongoing climate and landscape alteration. The grid-based spatially distributed model, Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model-Water Quality (DHSVM-WQ), is an outgrowth of DHSVM that incorporates modules for assessing hydrology and water quality in urbanized watersheds...
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Resource managers, policymakers, and scientists require tools to inform water resource management and planning. Information on hydrologic factors – such as streamflow, snowpack, and soil moisture – is important for understanding and predicting wildfire risk, flood activity, and agricultural and rangeland productivity, among others. Existing tools for modeling hydrologic conditions rely on information on temperature and precipitation. This project sought to evaluate different methods for downscaling global climate models – that is, taking information produced at a global scale and making it useable at a regional scale, in order to produce more accurate projections of temperature and precipitation for the Pacific...
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after wildfire by providing habitat and seed sources. With increasing fire activity, there is speculation that fire intensity and...
Floodplains pose challenges to managers of conservation lands because of constantly changing interactions with their rivers. Although scientific knowledge and understanding of the dynamics and drivers of river-floodplain systems can provide guidance to floodplain managers, the scientific process often occurs in isolation from management. Further, communication barriers between scientists and managers can be obstacles to appropriate application of scientific knowledge. With the coproduction of science in mind, our objectives were the following: (1) to document management priorities of floodplain conservation lands, and (2) identify science needs required to better manage the identified management priorities under...
Climate change is already affecting species in many ways. Because individual species respond to climate change differently, some will be adversely affected by climate change whereas others may benefit. Successfully managing species in a changing climate will require an understanding of which species will be most and least impacted by climate change. Although several approaches have been proposed for assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change, it is unclear whether these approaches are likely to produce similar results. In this study, we compared the relative vulnerabilities to climate change of 76 species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and trees based on three different approaches to assessing vulnerability....
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Wildfire, drought, and insects are reshaping forests in the Western United States in a manner that is being exacerbated by warming temperatures. Disturbance events such as these can significantly alter the amount of land that is covered by forest in an area or region. Consequently, changes in forest cover from disturbance can impact water runoff conditions leading to dangerous flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. These events can be costly for society. In response, many land managers are using forest thinning and prescribed burning practices to reduce disturbance impacts, especially those that are caused by high-severity wildfire. In contrast to the wealth of research on the advantages of forest thinning...
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The threat of droughts and their associated impacts on the landscape and human communities has long been recognized in the United States, especially in high risk areas such as the South Central region. There is ample literature on the effects of long-term climate change and short-term climate variability on the occurrence of droughts. However, it is unclear whether this information meets the needs of relevant stakeholders and actually contributes to reducing the vulnerability or increasing the resilience of communities to droughts. For example, are the methods used to characterize the severity of drought – known as drought indices – effective tools for predicting the actual damage felt by communities? As droughts...
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The South Central U.S. encompasses a wide range of ecosystem types and precipitation patterns. Average annual precipitation is less than 10 inches in northwest New Mexico but can exceed 60 inches further east in Louisiana. Much of the region relies on warm-season convective precipitation – that is, highly localized brief but intense periods of rainfall that are common in the summer. This type of precipitation is a significant driver of climate and ecosystem function in the region, but it is also notoriously difficult to predict since it occurs at such small spatial and temporal scales. While global climate models are helpful for understanding and predicting large-scale precipitation trends, they often do not capture...
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Forests are of tremendous ecological and economic importance. They provide natural places for recreation, clean drinking water, and important habitats for fish and wildlife. However, the warmer temperatures and harsher droughts in the west that are related to climate change are causing die-offs of many trees. Outbreaks of insects, like the mountain pine beetle, that kill trees are also more likely in warmer, drier conditions. To maintain healthy and functioning forest ecosystems, one action forest managers can take is to make management decisions that will help forests adapt to future climate change. However, adaptation is a process based on genetic change and few tools are currently available for managers to use...
Abstract (from Wiley Online Library): Annual distributions of waterfowl during the nonbreeding period can influence ecological, cultural, and economic relationships. We used previously developed Weather Severity Indices (WSI) that explained migration by dabbling ducks in eastern North America and weather data from the North American Regional Reanalysis to develop an open-access internet-based tool (i.e., WSI web app) to visualize and query WSI data. We used data generated by the WSI web app to determine whether the weather known to elicit southerly migration by dabbling ducks had changed, from October to April 1979 to 2013. We detected that the amount of area in the Mississippi and Atlantic Flyways with weather...
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Overview Fishes of the Adirondack Park face numerous challenges. Summer Suckers are the only endemic vertebrate yet have suffered major range reductions, so we are analyzing their genome, body shape, and spawning timing to verify their uniqueness and current range. Warming patterns are expected to shift their spawning earlier, potentially intersecting with their recent ancestor (White Suckers) to create hybridization and reduced reproductive success. Minnows are more diverse in the Adirondacks, and our analyses suggest that they show three major distributional patterns that reflect post-glacial colonization and temperature preferences. We are analyzing data from hundreds of lakes to discern the rules that structure...
Wildfire refugia are forest patches that are minimally-impacted by fire and provide critical habitats for fire-sensitive species and seed sources for post-fire forest regeneration. Wildfire refugia are relatively understudied, particularly concerning the impacts of subsequent fires on existing refugia. We opportunistically re-visited 122 sites classified in 1994 for a prior fire refugia study, which were burned by two wildfires in 2012 in the Cascade mountains of central Washington, USA. We evaluated the fire effects for historically persistent fire refugia and compared them to the surrounding non-refugial forest matrix. Of 122 total refugial (43 plots) and non-refugial (79 plots) sites sampled following the 2012...
Effective climate change adaptation for northeast fish and wildlife can be guided and focused by State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), last updated in 2015. Plans include conservation targets (species and habitats), threats, and actions, including climate change vulnerability analyses and conservation measures to respond to climate change related stressors. Across the northeast states’ SWAPs, priority threat themes emerge - pollution, disease, invasive species, development, and climate change.
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Drought is a common consequence of climate variability in the south-central U.S., but they are expected to occur more often and become more intense with climate change. Natural resource managers can improve their planning efforts with advance warnings of impending drought. Using input from resource managers in the Chickasaw Nation, this research team previously created models that forecast droughts up to 18 months in advance with information about their expected timing and intensity. Developed for all climate divisions in Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, these drought models rely on input from predictor variables associated with global weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña. However, it is unclear...
map background search result map search result map Improving Projections of Hydrology in the Pacific Northwest Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Improving Representation of Extreme Precipitation Events in Regional Climate Models Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Relations Among Cheatgrass, Fire, Climate, and Sensitive-Status Birds across the Great Basin Using Genetic Information to Understand Drought Tolerance and Bark Beetle Resistance in Whitebark Pine Forests Future of Fire in the South Central: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate The Role of Forest Structure in Regulating Water Availability and Implications for Natural Resources and Ecosystem Function Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking Improving Predictive Drought Models with Sensitivity Analysis Using Genetic Information to Understand Drought Tolerance and Bark Beetle Resistance in Whitebark Pine Forests Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Improving Predictive Drought Models with Sensitivity Analysis The Role of Forest Structure in Regulating Water Availability and Implications for Natural Resources and Ecosystem Function Relations Among Cheatgrass, Fire, Climate, and Sensitive-Status Birds across the Great Basin Improving Projections of Hydrology in the Pacific Northwest Improving Representation of Extreme Precipitation Events in Regional Climate Models Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Future of Fire in the South Central: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking