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Abstract (from AMS): The upper Colorado River basin (UCRB) is one of the primary sources of water for the western United States, and increasing temperatures likely will elevate the risk of reduced water supply in the basin. Although variability in water-year precipitation explains more of the variability in water-year UCRB streamflow than water-year UCRB temperature, since the late 1980s, increases in temperature in the UCRB have caused a substantial reduction in UCRB runoff efficiency (the ratio of streamflow to precipitation). These reductions in flow because of increasing temperatures are the largest documented temperature-related reductions since record keeping began. Increases in UCRB temperature over the past...
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The threat of droughts and their associated impacts on the landscape and human communities have long been recognized in the United States, especially in high risk areas such as the southcentral region. This project examines whether existing drought indices can predict the occurrence of drought events and their actual damages, how the adaptive capacity (i.e., resilience) varies across space, and what public outreach and engagement effort would be most effective for mitigation of risk and impacts. The study region includes all 503 counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. This data set was created to assess the community resilience to the drought hazards using the Resilience Inference Measurement...
The goal of barrier island restoration in the northern Gulf of Mexico is to restore barrier island morphology using sediment to support the functions and habitats the islands provide. Barrier island restoration typically involves placement of sediment either directly on the island footprint or within the littoral zone for system transport and distribution. The re-engineering of barrier islands presents numerous challenges and uncertainties associated with climate change induced hurricanes/storms and other dynamic components of the system such as sediment availability and erosional trends. The goal of this study was to use a collaborative SDM approach to develop two Bayesian decision network models (DMs) for restoration...
Abstract (from SpringerLink): The resilience of socio-ecological systems to sea level rise, storms and flooding can be enhanced when coastal habitats are used as natural infrastructure. Grey infrastructure has long been used for coastal flood protection but can lead to unintended negative impacts. Natural infrastructure often provides similar services as well as added benefits that support short- and long-term biological, cultural, social, and economic goals. While natural infrastructure is becoming more widespread in practice, it often represents a relatively small fraction within portfolios of coastal risk-reducing strategies compared to more traditional grey infrastructure. This study provides a comprehensive...
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eap.1389/full): Woody plant encroachment and overall declines in perennial vegetation in dryland regions can alter ecosystem properties and indicate land degradation, but the causes of these shifts remain controversial. Determining how changes in the abundance and distribution of grass and woody plants are influenced by conditions that regulate water availability at a regional scale provides a baseline to compare how management actions alter the composition of these vegetation types at a more local scale and can be used to predict future shifts under climate change. Using a remote-sensing-based approach, we assessed the balance between grasses and woody plants...
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-15-0042.1): Drought is a natural part of the historical climate variability in the northern Rocky Mountains and high plains region of the United States. However, recent drought impacts and climate change projections have increased the need for a systematized way to document and understand drought in a manner that is meaningful to public land and resource managers. The purpose of this exploratory study was to characterize the ways in which some federal and tribal natural resource managers experienced and dealt with drought on lands managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and tribes in two case site examples (northwest Colorado and southwest...
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To assess the current topography of the tidal marshes we conducted survey-grade elevation surveys at all sites between 2009 and 2013 using a Leica RX1200 Real Time Kinematic (RTK)Global Positioning System (GPS) rover (±1 cm horizontal, ±2 cm vertical accuracy; Leica Geosystems Inc., Norcross, GA; Figure 4). At sites with RTK network coverage (San Pablo, Petaluma, Pt. Mugu, and Newport), rover positions were received in real time from the Leica Smartnet system via a CDMA modem (www.lecia-geosystems.com). At sites without network coverage (Humboldt, Bolinas, Morro and Tijuana), rover positions were received in real time from a Leica GS10 antenna base station via radio link. When using the base station, we adjusted...
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To assess the current topography of the tidal marshes we conducted survey-grade elevation surveys at all sites between 2009 and 2013 using a Leica RX1200 Real Time Kinematic (RTK)Global Positioning System (GPS) rover (±1 cm horizontal, ±2 cm vertical accuracy; Leica Geosystems Inc., Norcross, GA; Figure 4). At sites with RTK network coverage (San Pablo, Petaluma, Pt. Mugu, and Newport), rover positions were received in real time from the Leica Smartnet system via a CDMA modem (www.lecia-geosystems.com). At sites without network coverage (Humboldt, Bolinas, Morro and Tijuana), rover positions were received in real time from a Leica GS10 antenna base station via radio link. When using the base station, we adjusted...
Abstract (from PLOS ONE): The responses of individuals and populations to climate change vary as functions of physiology, ecology, and plasticity. We investigated whether annual variation in seasonal temperature and precipitation was associated with relative abundances of breeding bird species at local and regional levels in southern California, USA, from 1968–2013. We tested our hypotheses that abundances were correlated positively with precipitation and negatively with temperature in this semiarid to arid region. We also examined whether responses to climate varied among groups of species with similar land-cover associations, nesting locations, and migratory patterns. We investigated relations between seasonal...
Abstract (from Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation): The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to map and monitor the environment has increased sharply in the last few years. Many individuals and organizations have purchased consumer‐grade UAVs, and commonly acquire aerial photographs to map land cover. The resulting ultra‐high‐resolution (sub‐decimeter‐resolution) imagery has high information content, but automating the extraction of this information to create accurate, wall‐to‐wall land‐cover maps is quite difficult. We introduce image‐processing workflows that are based on open‐source software and can be used to create land‐cover maps from ultra‐high‐resolution aerial imagery. We compared four machine‐learning...
Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) has increased the extent and frequency of fire and negatively affected native plant and animal species across the Intermountain West (USA). However, the strengths of association between cheatgrass occurrence or abundance and fire, livestock grazing, and precipitation are not well understood. We used 14 years of data from 417 sites across 10,000 km(2) in the central Great Basin to assess the effects of the foregoing predictors on cheatgrass occurrence and prevalence (i.e., given occurrence, the proportion of measurements in which the species was detected). We implemented hierarchical Bayesian models and considered covariates for which > 0.90 or < 0.10 of the posterior predictive mass...
Abstract (from http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/21/1/2017/): The phase of precipitation when it reaches the ground is a first-order driver of hydrologic processes in a watershed. The presence of snow, rain, or mixed-phase precipitation affects the initial and boundary conditions that drive hydrological models. Despite their foundational importance to terrestrial hydrology, typical phase partitioning methods (PPMs) specify the phase based on near-surface air temperature only. Our review conveys the diversity of tools available for PPMs in hydrological modeling and the advancements needed to improve predictions in complex terrain with large spatiotemporal variations in precipitation phase. Initially, we review...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): The interannual variability of tidal marsh plant phenology is largely unknown and may have important ecological consequences. Marsh plants are critical to the biogeomorphic feedback processes that build estuarine soils, maintain marsh elevation relative to sea level, and sequester carbon. We calculated Tasseled Cap Greenness, a metric of plant biomass, using remotely sensed data available in the Landsat archive to assess how recent climate variation has affected biomass production and plant phenology across three maritime tidal marshes in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. First, we used clipped vegetation plots at one of our sites to confirm that tasseled cap greenness provided...
Abstract (from http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3955/046.089.0305): It is hypothesized that climate impacts forest mosaics through dynamic ecological processes such as wildfires. However, climate-fire research has primarily focused on understanding drivers of fire frequency and area burned, largely due to scale mismatches and limited data availability. Recent datasets, however, allow for the investigation of climate influences on ecological patch metrics across broad regions independent of area burned and at finer scale. One area of particular interest is the distribution of fire refugia within wildfire perimeters. Although much recent research emphasis has been placed on high-severity patches within wildfires,...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112716308532): Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover. Acquisition of pre- and post-fire Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data on the 2012 Pole Creek Fire in central Oregon provided an opportunity to isolate and quantify fire effects coincident with specific agents of change. This study characterizes the influence of pre-fire mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonus...
Abstract (from http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6f94/meta): High temperatures and severe drought contributed to extensive tree mortality from fires and bark beetles during the 2000s in parts of the western continental United States. Several states in this region have greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets and would benefit from information on the amount of carbon stored in tree biomass killed by disturbance. We quantified mean annual tree mortality from fires, bark beetles, and timber harvest from 2003–2012 for each state in this region. We estimated tree mortality from fires and beetles using tree aboveground carbon (AGC) stock and disturbance data sets derived largely from remote sensing. We...
As the Earth’s climate changed in the ancient past, many species moved across the landscape to track adequate environmental conditions. Some species took shelter in remaining pockets of suitable climates, referred to as refugia. For example, refugia harbored species when vast glaciers covered much of the land, allowing them to survive and migrate again across the landscape as temperatures warmed and ice melted. Modern changes in climate are similarly compelling species to move, and some of those species may seek shelter from increasingly hostile conditions in refugia. Modern climate refugia will likely take many different forms. For example, larger-scale macrorefugia may be areas of relative climate stability that...
This fact sheet was prepared by Jessica Halofsky, David Peterson and Brian Harvey, University of Washington, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Editorial assistance from Patti Loesche and Darcy Widmayer. Funding for this work provided by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. This fact sheets goes with the following synthesis paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8.
Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11258-016-0568-y): Resprouting is a key functional trait for species in disturbance prone environments. In many semi-arid environments, woody plants face both fire and drought as recurring disturbances. Past work has demonstrated that oaks inhabiting sky-island forests of the northern Sierra Madre Oriental have differing microhabitat preferences and heavy stem dieback occured during the historic 2011 drought indicating potential xylem failure. These oak species, representing two sections within the genus, are all post-fire resprouters: they can resprout from underground storage organs when fire kills above ground tissue. Resprouts provide an opportunity to...
Abstract (from Natural Hazards): Drought indices are useful for quantifying drought severity and have shown mixed success as an indicator of drought damage and biophysical dryness. While spatial downscaling of drought indicators from the climate divisional level to the county level has been conducted successfully in previous work, little research to date has attempted to “upscale” remotely sensed biophysical indicators to match the downscaled drought indices. This upscaling is important because drought damage and indices are often reported at a coarser scale than the biophysical indicators provide. This research upscales National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer sensor-acquired...
map background search result map search result map Morro Bay, California: Tidal Marsh Digital Elevation Model Pt. Mugu, California: Tidal Marsh Digital Elevation Model Combined county-level drought incidence, damage, and census data Pt. Mugu, California: Tidal Marsh Digital Elevation Model Morro Bay, California: Tidal Marsh Digital Elevation Model Combined county-level drought incidence, damage, and census data