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Current stormwater management infrastructure and strategies in the northeastern US are built around historical weather data and not the weather that is expected with climate change, like more frequent extreme rainfall. This matters because stormwater can introduce pollution to streams and can cause flooding. Researchers supported by this Northeast CASC project will combine climate data, stormwater models, and data about urban streams to provide actionable information for managers to identify effective adaptation strategies for stormwater to protect lake and stream ecosystems in the northeastern US. Stormwater, or rainfall that lands on rooftops and pavement and quickly drains away, transports pollution like excess...
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Natural resource managers and researchers often need long-term averages of historical and future climate scenarios for their study area yet may not have the resources to make these summaries. This project will provide high quality, detailed maps of historical and projected future climate and hydrologic conditions for California and a finer scale version for southern California. The project will also assess the feasibility of expanding these reference data to the southwestern US and identify the most suitable online data portals for the public to view and analyze the data in support of local initiatives. The map products can be used to assess the impacts of ongoing climate change and to develop climate adaptation...
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As part of the State Wildlife Grant Fund, states are required to submit State Wildlife Plans (SWAPs) every 10 years detailing threats to habitats and species and conservation plans. However, incorporating climate change in SWAPs is voluntary, and capacity/expertise limitations at state agencies have resulted in varied and often only partial consideration of climate change impacts. In response, the MW CASC will conduct literature reviews to assess climate stressors and impacts to habitats and key species and to identify relevant adaptation actions for 13 different Level 2/3 EPA Ecoregions contained within the MW CASC area states. This work will provide a foundation for future habitat vulnerability assessments. ...
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Climate change is expected to worsen the harmful effects of invasive species on native wildlife. This presents a growing conservation challenge for invasive species managers in the southeastern United States where thousands of invasive species exist. While many of these invasive species currently have relatively small ranges in the southeastern U.S., climate change may allow them to expand into new regions. To effectively plan and respond to the redistribution of invasive species, it is crucial to coordinate existing information and identify future information needs across regional boundaries. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve invasive species management in the face of climate change by establishing...
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Virtually all species are experiencing the effects of modern climate change. Climate-induced extinction rates are accelerating, and up to one-sixth of species are predicted to go extinct by the end of this century. Given the unprecedented rate of modern climate change, species will be increasingly unable to shift in lockstep with emerging climate spaces, and as a result, phenotypic variation (e.g., body size, coat color, morphology) is a critical pathway by which species can adapt. Ecologists have documented remarkable examples of phenotypic plasticity in nature (changes in an organism's behavior, morphology, and physiology in response to a unique environment), but when the degree of plasticity can no longer match...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Invasive species establish outside of their native range, spread, and negatively impact ecosystems and economies. As temperatures rise, many invasive plants can spread into regions that were previously too cold for their survival. For example, kudzu, ‘the vine that ate the south’, was previously limited to mid-Atlantic states, but has recently started spreading in New Jersey and is expected to become invasive farther north. While scientists know of many of the invasive species expanding into the northeastern U.S., they do not know where those species are likely to become abundant and how they will impact vulnerable native ecosystems due to climate change. There are also currently no strategies to manage emerging...
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The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) has several Communities of Practice (CoPs) focused on resource manager needs across the region (e.g. understanding at-risk species and ecosystems, building resilient coastal ecosystems, extreme weather and climate change, etc.). Each CoP has expertise in the subject matter and has been working on projects that are relevant to the resource community, including conducting literature reviews and small-scale pilot projects. The current research project will leverage the expertise of the existing CoPs to enhance the content available through the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) as identified through the partnership between the South Central...
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There is growing evidence that headwater stream ecosystems are especially vulnerable to changing climate and land use, but managers are challenged by the need to address these threats at a landscape scale, often through coordination with multiple management agencies and landowners. This project sought to provide an example of cooperative landscape decision-making by addressing the conservation of headwater stream ecosystems in the face of climate change at the watershed scale. Predictive models were built for critical resources to examine the effects of the potential alternative actions on the objectives, taking account of climate effects and examining whether there are key uncertainties that impede decision making....
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The Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center (PI CASC) supports sustainability and climate adaptation in communities across the Pacific Islands by providing natural and cultural resource managers with access to actionable science specific to the region. PI CASC is hosted by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) with consortium partners at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo (UHH) and the University of Guam (UOG). During the period of 2019 - 2024, the PI CASC consortium will strive to i) build resiliency and sustainability in ecosystems and communities to climate change impacts; ii) strive to develop the best actionable climate science, while maintaining a non-advocacy stance; and iii) apply the elements...
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PI-CASC regularly interacts with a diverse and extensive network of stakeholder organizations at federal, territory, state, county, and local levels across the Pacific Region, supporting communication and iterative problem solving between researchers, managers, and decision makers. In addition to these partnerships, PI-CASC has two important ongoing collaborative initiatives. Pacific Islands-Alaska CASC collaboration The PI-AK CASC collaboration is aimed at bringing together scientist and resource managers from the Pacific and Alaska regions to share insights on related climate adaptation challenges in Ridge-to-Reef (R2R) and Icefield-to-Ocean (I2O) ecosystems. Similarities in landscapes and communities in these...
map background search result map search result map Improving Projections of Hydrology in the Pacific Northwest Projecting the Future of Headwater Streams to Inform Management Decisions 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 Identifying Vulnerable Ecosystems and Supporting Climate-Smart Strategies to Address Invasive Species Under Climate Change Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa (2019-2024) Regional Collaborations 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 Expanding the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) to the South Central United States State Wildlife Action Planning in the Midwest Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking Phase One: Southeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network (SE RISCC) Improving Predictive Drought Models with Sensitivity Analysis Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Designing Climate-Resilient Stormwater Management in Northeastern US Cities to Support Stream Ecosystems The Role of Phenotypic Plasticity in the Adaptive Capacity of Midwestern Fish and Wildlife 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 Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Designing Climate-Resilient Stormwater Management in Northeastern US Cities to Support Stream Ecosystems 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 State Wildlife Action Planning in the Midwest The Role of Phenotypic Plasticity in the Adaptive Capacity of Midwestern Fish and Wildlife Expanding the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) to the South Central United States Phase One: Southeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network (SE RISCC) Adirondack Fish Conservation: Safeguarding Summer Suckers, Understanding Minnow Diversity, Limiting Smallmouth Bass Invasions, Developing Climate-Adapted Stocking Identifying Vulnerable Ecosystems and Supporting Climate-Smart Strategies to Address Invasive Species Under Climate Change Projecting the Future of Headwater Streams to Inform Management Decisions Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa (2019-2024) Regional Collaborations