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Folders: ROOT > ScienceBase Catalog > National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers > Southeast CASC > FY 2015 Projects ( Show direct descendants )

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National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) along the East Coast of the United States protect habitat for a host of wildlife species, while also offering storm surge protection, improving water quality, supporting nurseries for commercially important fish and shellfish, and providing recreation opportunities for coastal communities. Yet in the last century, coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by human development activities as well as sea-level rise and more frequent extreme events related to climate change. These influences threaten the ability of NWRs to protect our nation’s natural resources and to sustain their many beneficial services. Through this project, researchers are collaborating with...
Urban forests provide well-documented environmental and societal benefits valued at more than four billion dollars per year in the United States. As cities expand onto land once occupied by rural forests, urban trees take on an even more vital role in mitigating global climate change, conserving biodiversity, and protecting human health. Maintaining the health of trees is challenging in cities and in forests under climate change because of tree stress and pests. Unhealthy trees do not provide adequate ecosystem services or conservation value compared to healthy trees. In this work we found that exotic trees can remain healthy and maintain biodiversity of arthropods (e.g. spiders and insects) that is similar to native...
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In this proposal we investigate how tree selection at the local scale affects biodiversity and ecosystem services (Obj. 1). We then look regionally to determine the extent to which trees in cities can be used to predict heat-related threats to rural forests (Obj. 2). We will leverage ongoing investigations of heat-related stress and pest outbreaks in urban and rural forests to develop management recommendations for both systems. These ongoing projects provide a knowledge-base, infrastructure (e.g. study sites), equipment (e.g. Li-Cor Photosynthesis System), and outreach opportunities that will extend the impact of this project (see Synergistic and Future Funding section below). We will also convene a working group...
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To better understand the impacts of climate change, ecological studies are increasingly addressing the different effects of temperature on organisms and ecosystems. To measure air temperature at biologically relevant scales in the field, ecologists often use small, portable temperature sensors. These sensors must be shielded from solar radiation to provide accurate temperature measurements, but a review of 18 years of ecological literature indicated that shielding practices vary across studies (when the shielding is reported at all), and that ecologists often invent and construct ad-hoc radiation shields without testing their efficacy. The project researchers performed two field experiments to examine the accuracy...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Natural resource plans play a critical role in guiding the sustainable management of forest ecosystems. However, little is known about the quality of management plans. In this study, we evaluated and compared the quality of 35 management plans from federal, state, and nongovernment groups managing longleaf pine ecosystems in the Southeast United States. We developed a plan evaluation tool consisted of five components: (1) Problem and Objective Statement, (2) Fact Base, (3) Actions and Implementation, (4) Integration with Other Plans, and (5) Stakeholder Participation, to examine to what extent plans incorporated planning best practices. We tested a hypothetical model for understanding...
Abstract (from USGS): Adapting cultural resources to climate-change effects challenges traditional cultural resource decision making because some adaptation strategies can negatively affect the integrity of cultural resources. Yet, the inevitability of climate-change effects—even given the uncertain timing of those effects—necessitates that managers begin prioritizing resources for climate-change adaptation. Prioritization imposes an additional management challenge: managers must make difficult tradeoffs to achieve desired management outcomes related to maximizing the resource values. This report provides an overview of a pilot effort to integrate vulnerability (exposure and sensitivity), significance, and use potential...
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Climate and land use change will strongly affect tropical island ecosystems and trust species (like migratory birds and threatened and endangered species). The risks of significant negative impacts are likely to be higher in these island systems than in many temperate regions of the world because of the limited size of their land masses, high numbers of species that only exist in narrowly defined regions, and expectations that tropical environments will experience greater changes in temperature. Tropical island communities are faced with making important decisions related to adaptation that could impact the health of important natural resources and ecosystems. However, a lack of scientific guidance and information...
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Climate change doesn’t just threaten our natural resources—it threatens our cultural resources, too. Cultural resources represent evidence of past human activity, such as archeological sites, or are of significance to a group of people traditionally associated with the resource, such as Native American ceremonial sites. Climate change is challenging the long-term persistence of many cultural resources. For example, those located in coastal areas, such as historic lighthouses, are threatened by sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, and more frequent severe storm events. While climate change challenges managers of both natural and cultural resources to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, far less work has been...
Executive Summary: Since 2011, the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) partnership has promoted an overarching vision for landscape conservation in the Southeast. To realize that vision, SECAS provides a forum for collaboration, bringing together state and federal agencies and nonprofit conservation organizations. SECAS also functions as an information hub for science delivery and decision support through the Southeast Conservation Blueprint, a data-driven platform that identifies important areas for conservation and restoration. Both of these functions help the partnership pursue its goal of measurably improving the health, function, and connectivity of Southeastern ecosystems. To ensure the partnership’s...
Abstract (from Ecological Society of America (ESA): Climate change and urban growth impact habitats, species, and ecosystem services. To buffer against global change, an established adaptation strategy is designing protected areas to increase representation and complementarity of biodiversity features. Uncertainty regarding the scale and magnitude of landscape change complicates reserve planning and exposes decision makers to risk of failing to meet conservation goals. Conservation planning tends to treat risk as an absolute measure, ignoring the context of the management problem and risk preferences of stakeholders. Application to conservation of risk management theory emphasizes diversification of portfolio of...
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources want to develop a plan of actions to protect 12 species of coqui frogs (Eleutherodactylus spp.) that are currently considered at risk of being considered threatened or endangered, requiring additional protections under the Endangered Species Act. Actions center on two possible adaptation strategies: a) translocations to suitable, unoccupied habitat, and b) identifying climate-resilient habitats to ensure the persistence of species. Knowledge required to implement these strategies includes understanding how microhabitat and microclimatic factors – the local environmental conditions around individual frogs influence...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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The Southeast is currently undergoing high rates of population growth, urbanization, and land use change while also experiencing climatic changes. These changes are and will continue to threaten wildlife and their habitats. Most existing conservation programs and activities, however, focus on maintaining systems in their current condition, or returning them to a historic state, rather than enabling systems to adapt to projected changes. Recognizing this problem state fish and wildlife agencies, together with US Fish and Wildlife Service and others, have initiated the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS). This project will support the SECAS effort, which aims to develop a collaborative network of conservation...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect) In recent years, researchers from interdisciplinary teams involving ecologists, economists and operations researchers collaborated to provide decision support tools to address the challenges of preserving biodiversity by optimizing the design of reserves. The goal of this paper is to further advance this area of research and provide new solutions to solve complex Spatial Conservation Planning (SCP) problems under uncertainty that consider risk preferences of decision makers. Our approach employs modern portfolio theory to address uncertainties in SCP problems, and involves two conflicting objectives: maximizing return and minimizing risk. We apply concepts from game theory such as the...
Abstract (from USGS Publications Warehouse): This final report summarizes activities, outcomes, and lessons learned from a 3-year project titled “Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges” with the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and local partners in the surrounding South Carolina Lowcountry. The Lowcountry is classified as the 10-county area encompassing the coastal plain of South Carolina (this report specifically focuses on Berkeley, Charleston, and Georgetown Counties). The goals of this work, sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (SECASC), were to foster active engagement with stakeholders; to develop a comprehensive definition...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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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...
Coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by local processes associated with human development, including drainage of coastal wetlands, hydrologic alterations affecting sediment supply, and land-use change, and by global-scale ecological changes including sea-level rise and other effects associated with climate change. Together, these forces are degrading the capacity of ecological and social systems to respond to disturbance. The goal of this project was to foster active engagement with stakeholders; develop a comprehensive problem definition that expressed local values, knowledge, and perceptions; and encourage building of effective networks and trust across organizations and individuals...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Climate change poses great challenges for cultural resource management, particularly in coastal areas. Cultural resources, such as historic buildings, in coastal areas are vulnerable to climate impacts including inundation, deterioration, and destruction from sea-level rise and storm-related flooding and erosion. However, research that assesses the trade-offs between actions for protecting vulnerable and valuable cultural resources under budgetary constraints is limited. This study focused on developing a decision support model for managing historic buildings at Cape Lookout National Seashore. We designed the Optimal Preservation Decision Support (OptiPres) model to: (a) identify optimal,...
Abstract (from Science of The Total Environment): Globally increasing wildfires have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change. However, providing decision makers with a clear understanding of how future planetary warming could affect fire regimes is complicated by confounding land use factors that influence wildfire and by uncertainty associated with model simulations of climate change. We use an ensemble of statistically downscaled Global Climate Models in combination with the Physical Chemistry Fire Frequency Model (PC2FM) to project changing potential fire probabilities in the conterminous United States for two scenarios representing lower (RCP 4.5) and higher (RCP 8.5) greenhouse gas emission futures....
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The Southeast is currently undergoing high rates of population growth, urbanization, and land use change while also experiencing climatic changes. These changes are threatening, and will continue to threaten, wildlife and their habitats. Most existing conservation programs and activities, however, focus on maintaining systems in their current condition, or returning them to a historic state, rather than enabling systems to adapt to projected changes. This project was designed to support the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) effort in developing a collaborative network of conservation partners, shared conservation goals, and regional strategies to manage fish, wildlife, and other natural resources...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Trees are important components of urban landscapes because of the ecosystem services they provide. However, the effects of urbanization, particularly high temperatures, can benefit chronic insect pests and threaten ecosystem services offered by urban trees. Urban forest fragments are an often-overlooked component of the greater urban forest which may help to mitigate the damaging effects of urbanization. Melanaspis tenebricosa (gloomy scale) is a common pest of Acer rubrum(red maple) that becomes more abundant because of the urban heat island effect. We conducted observational and manipulative field experiments to test the hypothesis that trees in urban forest fragments would be cooler...
map background search result map search result map Conservation Adaptation Planning for Landscape and Climate Change in the Southeast Protecting Cultural Resources in the Face of Climate Change Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges Consequences of Urbanization and Climate Change on Human and Ecosystem Health Climate Change Implications for the Conservation of Amphibians in Tropical Environments Supporting Strategic Landscape Conservation Decisions in the U.S. Caribbean Testing the Impacts of Sun Exposure and Impervious Surfaces on the Accuracy of Temperature Sensors Protecting Cultural Resources in the Face of Climate Change Testing the Impacts of Sun Exposure and Impervious Surfaces on the Accuracy of Temperature Sensors Climate Change Adaptation for Coastal National Wildlife Refuges Climate Change Implications for the Conservation of Amphibians in Tropical Environments Supporting Strategic Landscape Conservation Decisions in the U.S. Caribbean Consequences of Urbanization and Climate Change on Human and Ecosystem Health Conservation Adaptation Planning for Landscape and Climate Change in the Southeast