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Land and water managers often rely on hydrological models to make informed management decisions. Understanding water availability in streams, rivers, and reservoirs during high demand periods that coincide with seasonal low flows can affect how water managers plan for its distribution for human consumption while sustaining aquatic ecosystems. Substantial advancement in hydrological modeling has occurred in the last several decades resulting in models that range widely in complexity and outputs. However, managers can still struggle to make informed decisions with these models for a variety of reasons, including misalignments between model outputs and the specific decision they are intended to inform, limitations...
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The long-term success of management efforts in sagebrush habitats are increasingly complicated by the impacts of a changing climate throughout the western United States. These complications are most evident in the ongoing challenges of drought and altered rangeland fire regimes resulting from the establishment of nonnative annual grasses. The Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy recognized these growing threats to sagebrush habitat and initiated the development of an Actionable Science Plan to help the scientific and management communities address the highest priority science needs to help improve rangeland management efficacy in the West. Since the establishment of the original Integrated Rangeland Fire...
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Climate Change is making our environment unpredictable. Increased persistence of drought is causing deaths of plants and animals across our landscapes. However, drought amongst the western United States is not a new thing. Native American populations have been living with drought since time immemorial and practiced culturally prescribed fire practices to foster the landscape for an environment that provides resources for tribal livelihoods and traditional practices (Marks-Block et al. 2019). The United States Geologic Survey and the Yurok Tribe are partnering to study the effects of prescribed burns actively occurring in Yurok Ancestral Territory. Prescribed burns promote a healthy ecosystem through positively...
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Natural climate variability can obscure or enhance long-term trends in experienced weather due to climate change. This can happen temporarily on timescales of a season to several years to a decade or two. Natural variability is poorly described and attributed to specific causes, contributing to uncertainty and misunderstandings about the nature of climate change that stakeholders and resource managers attempt to anticipate. There exists, therefore, a need to clarify the magnitude and causality of natural climate variability. This connection needs to be explained for locally-experienced weather and particularly for daily extreme events, whose seasonal behavior impacts both resources and imagination. Conversely, it...
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Mature, old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest provide critical habitat for threatened and endangered species, including the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Dominated by large Douglas-firs and western hemlocks, these established forests range in age from 200 to 1,000 years old. Yet wildfire activity is increasing across western North America, heightening concerns about severe fires that have the potential to kill the upper canopy layer of forests. Known as “stand-replacing fires”, these extreme events have important implications for forest ecosystems, initiating forest regrowth and altering habitat for wildlife. Identifying locations that are protected from stand-replacing fire is an urgent management...
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Over two-thirds of all landbirds (i.e. birds that spend the majority of their lives in terrestrial environments) in North America migrate long-distances to areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. Habitats within Texas and Louisiana support high numbers of birds when they interrupt their migratory journeys through the Gulf of Mexico region to “stopover” for resting and refueling. These stopover habitats are often in areas experiencing human population growth and are impacted by natural disturbances and climate change. Predicted habitat loss from sea level rise and extreme weather events coupled with mismatches in the timing of peak bird migration and peak food abundance may limit the...
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The Bonnet Carré spillway (BCS) is a flood-control structure along the Lower Mississippi River designed to prevent flooding in the city of New Orleans by diverting excess water into the nearby Lake Pontchartrain estuary. Alarmingly, the BCS was opened as many times over the past decade (2011–2020) as it had been over the six prior decades combined (1951–2010), with devastating effects on the estuary’s valuable fisheries. Because the BCS was rarely used in the past, there is little science-based guidance for state agencies to consult when trying to manage these events. In light of the unprecedented increase in BCS operation, this project will conduct research to understand (1) how opening the BCS affects Lake Pontchartrain...
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Steep, mountainous watersheds, dramatic climate gradients, and tight links between the land and sea are common features of both the Pacific Islands and Southeast Alaska. In these "ridge-to-reef" and “icefield-to-ocean" ecosystems, environmental changes that occur at higher elevations have downstream impacts on the waters below. Today, these two ecosystems are undergoing changes in climate that are significantly impacting the terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems that communities rely on for food, water, recreation, and tourism. For example, changing weather patterns are leading to more frequent and severe extreme storms, atmospheric rivers, droughts, and heat waves. Communities in both regions have deep...
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Soil moisture is a critical variable for understanding the impacts of drought on ecological, hydrological, and agricultural systems. Yet, key research gaps currently prevent existing soil moisture measurements from being used to assess drought conditions and mitigate drought impacts such as wildfire outbreaks, lost agricultural production, and degraded wildlife habitat. In fact, most scales used to characterize the severity of drought, known as “drought indices”, don’t include soil moisture measurements, relying instead on atmospheric data. Current barriers to the incorporation of soil moisture data include a lack of consensus regarding how to best construct soil moisture-based drought indices, the challenges associated...
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Recent extreme floods on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers have motivated decision-makers and resource managers to expaned floodplain conservation lands. Within Missouri, there are more than 85,000 acres of public conservation lands in large-river floodplains. Floodplain lands are highly dynamic and challenging to manage, particularly climatic conditions change. These lands have the potential to provide valuable ecosystem services, like wildlife habitat, nutrient processing, carbon sequestration, and flood-water storage, that produce economic values in terms of recreational spending, improved water quality, and decreased flood hazards. However, floodplain managers may need tools to help them understand changing...
The Pacific Islands Climate Science Center (PI-CSC) was established in 2012 to address societal impacts of climate change and variability for Department of the Interior and other natural and cultural heritage managers, community planners, and Pacific Island communities in Hawaiʻi and the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI). The USAPI includes the Territory of American Samoa, Territory of Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Freely Associated States of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau. The PI-CSC works with scientists and resource managers to provide climate change prediction and impact data, analysis, and translational products...
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This data release includes data-processing scripts, data products, and associated metadata for a remote-sensing based approach to characterize vegetation conditions within a dry, mixed conifer forest study area in southern Oregon in 2001 (a single year drought without any widespread insect mortality) and 2009 (during a multi-year drought that coincided with a severe outbreak of mountain pine beetle; MPB). This analysis involved several steps. First, time-series climate data were compiled and plotted to identify drought periods. Similarly, time-series data representing insect outbreaks were compiled and plotted to identify trends in insect mortality. The study area was classified into forest canopy types using existing...
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This data set characterizes the thermal regime in a number of Colorado and New Mexico streams that contain populations of Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii virginalis) or have been considered potential restoration areas for the fish. The majority of these streams had no previous record of continual temperature records. When compared to Colorado water temperature criteria (Cold Tier 1), a portion of these populations appeared to be at risk from elevated stream temperatures, as indicated by exceedance of both acute and chronic water quality metrics. Summer water temperature profiles recorded at sites within current Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout habitat indicated that although the majority of currently...
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This dataset includes stream temperatures from a network of 100 data loggers that was installed throughout the Willow-Whitehorse watershed of SE Oregon in September 2014, as well as 10 additional sites that were installed in 2011 and 2012, before and after a 2012 fire that burned nearly the entire watershed. Data loggers were downloaded in August 2015. A spatial data layer contains the site locations and associated information about the sites, along with summary temperature information and a comparison to modeled stream temperatures (NorWeST).
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...
The HPRCC has an established partnership with the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) and has enjoyed collaborating on regional projects since its inception. Housed at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the NC CSC is one of eight such centers that were established in 2010 within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The mission of the Climate Science Centers is to help meet the changing needs of land and resource managers across the U.S. (For more information on the Climate Science Centers, please visit: https://www.doi.gov/csc/about.) The NC CSC collaborates with a consortium of nine institutions that provide expertise in climate science and sectors impacted by climate. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln,...
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This dataset provides downscaled climate projections at 800m spatial resolution for nine ecologically-relevant climate variables for the north central US region between 35.5N-49N latitude and 88W-118W longitude from the National Center of Atmospheric Research (USA) model, CCSM4, simulations (r6i1p1) from two emissions scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5), which are downscaled using the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analog (MACA) method. These projections are available as five different (approximately) 30-year climate normals between 1950 and 2099 as monthly values, except for Aridity Index which are annual values. The five periods for which these climate normals are provided are 1950-1979 and 1980-2005 in the historic,...
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Nutritional ecology forms the interface between environmental variability and large herbivore behaviour, life history characteristics, and population dynamics. Forage conditions in arid and semi-arid regions are driven by unpredictable spatial and temporal patterns in rainfall. Diet selection by herbivores should be directed towards overcoming the most pressing nutritional limitation (i.e. energy, protein [nitrogen, N], moisture) within the constraints imposed by temporal and spatial variability in forage conditions. We investigated the influence of precipitation-induced shifts in forage nutritional quality and subsequent large herbivore responses across widely varying precipitation conditions in an arid environment....
map background search result map search result map Understanding and Communicating the Role of Natural Climate Variability in a Changing World Science to Inform Management of Floodplain Conservation Lands in a Changing World Soil Moisture-Based Drought Monitoring for the South Central Region Water and Air Temperature Throughout the Range of Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout in Colorado and New Mexico; 2010-2015 V2 Stream Temperature Data in the Willow-Whitehorse watershed of SE Oregon, 2011-15 Extreme precipitation variability, forage quality and large herbivore diet selection in arid environments Analysis of remotely-sensed vegetation conditions during droughts and a mountain pine beetle outbreak, Gearhart Mountain Wilderness, Oregon CCSM4: Downscaled climate projections at 800m spatial resolution for the north central United States based on the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analog (MACA) method Fire Refugia in Old-Growth Forests: Predicting Habitat Persistence to Support Land Management in an Era of Rapid Global Change Adapting to Climate Change: Trends and Severe Storm Responses by Migratory Landbirds and Their Habitats State of the Science in Streamflow Modeling in the North Central Region to Address Partner Needs for Water Availability Under Drought Conditions Providing a Climate Science Foundation for Updating the Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy Actionable Science Plan Improving Water Resilience and Availability Through Culturally Prescribed Fires as a Management Tool on Yurok Tribal Lands A Fresh Set of Tools: New Information for Managing Fisheries During Changes in River Discharge Understanding Ridge-to-Reef and Icefield-to-Ocean Ecosystem Function in a Changing Climate Analysis of remotely-sensed vegetation conditions during droughts and a mountain pine beetle outbreak, Gearhart Mountain Wilderness, Oregon Stream Temperature Data in the Willow-Whitehorse watershed of SE Oregon, 2011-15 Extreme precipitation variability, forage quality and large herbivore diet selection in arid environments Improving Water Resilience and Availability Through Culturally Prescribed Fires as a Management Tool on Yurok Tribal Lands A Fresh Set of Tools: New Information for Managing Fisheries During Changes in River Discharge Water and Air Temperature Throughout the Range of Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout in Colorado and New Mexico; 2010-2015 V2 State of the Science in Streamflow Modeling in the North Central Region to Address Partner Needs for Water Availability Under Drought Conditions Fire Refugia in Old-Growth Forests: Predicting Habitat Persistence to Support Land Management in an Era of Rapid Global Change Science to Inform Management of Floodplain Conservation Lands in a Changing World Soil Moisture-Based Drought Monitoring for the South Central Region Understanding and Communicating the Role of Natural Climate Variability in a Changing World Adapting to Climate Change: Trends and Severe Storm Responses by Migratory Landbirds and Their Habitats Providing a Climate Science Foundation for Updating the Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy Actionable Science Plan CCSM4: Downscaled climate projections at 800m spatial resolution for the north central United States based on the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analog (MACA) method Understanding Ridge-to-Reef and Icefield-to-Ocean Ecosystem Function in a Changing Climate