Skip to main content
Advanced Search

Filters: Tags: North Central (X)

114 results (60ms)   

Filters
Date Range
Extensions
Types
Contacts
Categories
Tag Types
Tag Schemes
View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV
thumbnail
Preparing for and responding to drought requires integrating scientific information into complex decision making processes. In recognition of this challenge, regional drought early warning systems (DEWS) and related drought-information tools have been developed under the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). Despite the existence of many tools and information sources, however, the factors that influence if a tool(s) is (are) used, which tools are used, and how much benefit those tools provide remain poorly understood. Using the Upper Colorado River DEWS as a case study, this study investigated how water, land, and fire managers select from among many available tools. The Upper Colorado River Basin...
thumbnail
One of the most visible signs of climate change is less mountain snow. In the Western U.S., deep snow has historically been a cornerstone of life for many plants and animals. For example, snow can provide denning shelter for certain species like the wolverine, and snowmelt provides dependable water to mountain streams that are home to fish like the bull trout. Yet snow losses driven by warming temperatures are already causing land and water managers to rethink whether certain species can thrive in the future. A recently completed study by this research team helped the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigate whether wolverines will have enough snow to survive in two areas of the Rocky Mountains. In June 2020,...
thumbnail
Lakes, reservoirs, and ponds are central and integral features of the North Central U.S. These water bodies provide aesthetic, cultural, and ecosystem services to surrounding wildlife and human communities. External impacts – such as climate change – can have significant impacts to these important parts of the region’s landscape. Understanding the responses of lakes to these drivers is critical for species conservation and management decisions. Water temperature data are foundational to providing this understanding and are currently the most widely measured of all aquatic parameters with over 400 unique groups monitoring water temperature in U.S. lakes and rivers. However, lake temperature data are lacking at...
thumbnail
Drought is a complex environmental hazard that impacts both ecological and social systems. Accounting for the role of human attitudes, institutions, and societal values in drought planning is important to help identify how various drought durations and severity may differentially affect social resilience to adequately respond to and manage drought impacts. While there have been successful past efforts to understand how individuals, communities, institutions, and agencies plan for and respond to drought, these studies have relied on extensive multi-year case studies in specific locations. In contrast, this project seeks to determine how social science insights and methods can best contribute to ecological drought...
thumbnail
Assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change is a key step in anticipating climate impacts on species. Vulnerability assessments characterize species’ future conservation needs and can guide current planning and management actions to support species persistence in the face of climate change. A full assessment of climate vulnerability involves characterizing three essential components: sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and exposure. Assessing sensitivity and adaptive capacity, as well as determining which aspects of exposure to assess all require detailed knowledge of species-specific traits and ecology. Such a detailed understanding is hard to come by, even for well-studied species, thus, developing vulnerability...
thumbnail
Over the last half-century, grassland bird populations have declined far more than any other bird group in North America. This is because native grasslands were largely replaced with croplands, and many remaining prairies are degraded. Land managers and conservation organizations are racing to preserve and restore these ecosystems to stem further loss of grassland birds. Given limited resources, bird habitat models are needed to help managers prioritize where conservation efforts will be most effective. In addition to habitat loss and degradation from land use change, altered fire regimes, and woody encroachment, increasing greenhouse gas emissions will likely change temperatures and rainfall patterns across North...
thumbnail
Prescribed burning – planned, controlled fires conducted under weather and fuel conditions designed for safety and effectiveness – is a common practice used to maintain and restore native prairies in the Northern Great Plains. However, climate change will affect the number of days in a year, and when, suitable conditions for prescribed fires occur. For instance, warmer temperatures may shift these “good prescribed-fire days” earlier in the spring and later in the fall, but uncertainty about future climate makes it hard to predict how large shifts will be and if the number of good fire days each year will generally increase or decrease. Further, it’s hard to know whether prescribed fires will continue to achieve...
thumbnail
Invasions of exotic annual grasses (EAGs like cheatgrass have caused major losses of native shrubs and grasses in western U.S. rangelands. They also decrease the productivity and carbon storage in these ecosystems, which is expected to create dryer soils that may cause further losses in plant productivity. This cycle is the hallmark of desertification – or, fertile lands turning into deserts. Management actions that target EAGs are one of the most widespread land management actions taken in Western U.S. rangelands, but it is unclear which specific actions can simultaneously enhance drought resilience of native plant communities and increase carbon sequestration and storage. This project aims to identify the restoration...
thumbnail
The NC CASC has conducted numerous training and skills development activities to support partners and researchers as they seek to use scientific information and techniques to understand and respond to climate change impacts. Training topics range from basics of climate data integration (climate 101) to more specific topics like climate training activities for Tribes and Indigenous Communities and training videos on climate projection tools like the Climate Futures Toolbox. To learn more about upcoming training events, check NCCASC website for events regularlly and sign up for the NCCASC newsletter for announcements.
thumbnail
The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in 94 units, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to address potential future effects of management practices and climate change. The goal of this project is to outline the steps required for developing NPS grazing management plans, to identify information needs and availability for these planning processes, and to initiate a scenario-based pilot project for meeting these needs at a given park unit. This will serve as an important step toward developing a transferable process to help parks ensure that grazing management practices...
thumbnail
In the North Central U.S., the rate and extent of changing climate conditions has been increasing in recent decades. These changes include shifting precipitation patterns, warming temperatures, and more frequent extreme events, such as droughts and floods. As these changes occur, managers face different challenges and have different needs, depending on the resources they manage. For example, water managers are focused on responding to changes in water availability, while wildlife managers may be more concerned with changing habitat conditions – whether it be for migratory waterfowl, coldwater fish, or large mammals. In the face of these changes, managers are seeking effective strategies for managing resources....
thumbnail
Trout are one of the most culturally, economically, and ecologically important groups of freshwater fishes in the Rocky Mountain region. However, human impacts and climate change are significantly altering freshwater ecosystems that support native trout species. Despite their broad importance, many of the region’s trout populations are threatened and some require immediate conservation efforts to reverse their decline. Although work is being done to understand and mitigate these changes, the ability to accurately assess vulnerability is currently limited due to a lack of data-driven approaches that incorporate uncertainty and adaptive capacity at scales relevant to effective management. USGS researchers will...
thumbnail
The bison, which has long served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior, became the official national mammal of the United States in 2016. Bison played a key role in shaping the grasslands of the Great Plains for millennia, but today they are confined to unnaturally small ranges. National parks, including four in the Great Plains, provide a major last bastion for wild bison. Herds in Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are wild in that their movements are unconstrained within their park’s designated bison range, they receive no supplemental feed, minerals, or veterinary attention,...
thumbnail
The Climate Adaptation Science Centers have conducted numerous training and skills development activities to support tribal and indigenous partners as they seek to use scientific information and techniques to understand and respond to climate change impacts. Because these activities were generated in different CASC regions, with different tribal / indigenous stakeholders, climate change contexts, and training needs, and because the CASC network encourages innovation, these activities were not developed or implemented in a nationally consistent format. This project seeks to identify relevant activities, gather related materials and links that might benefit others seeking to implement similar activities, provide a...
thumbnail
The NC CASC hosts a variety of virtual and in-person workshops to build partnerships, collaborate and share information among the natural resources community including participants representing federal and state agency employees, university researchers, graduate students and others. Many of these workshops have been aimed at providing guidance on specific climate change tools and products that can be used to better integrate climate science into management and research. Some example topics include using climate data to understand global environmental change, climate change scenario planning, and snow-related data and information needs and next steps for modeling future snow projections. To learn more about NC CASC...
thumbnail
In response to the potential impacts of climate and land use change to the Nation’s ecosystems, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) launched a series of Rapid Ecoregional Assessments (REAs) in 2010. The REAs are focused on improving our understanding of the current state of ecosystems and how conditions may be impacted by changes in climate, land use, and other stressors. Researchers with the North Central CSC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provided climate science support to the Wyoming Basin REA. The Wyoming Basin REA is a landscape-scale ecological assessment of over 33 million acres in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. This region has some of the highest quality wildlife...
thumbnail
Natural & cultural resource managers are facing a slew of new challenges for managing public lands stemming from climate change and human-driven stressors like invasive species, fragmentation, and new resource uses. In some cases, the very landscapes and species they are managing are changing in significant ways, transforming from one set of conditions to another. As a result, previously successful management strategies may become less effective, or in some cases ineffective. New and transforming conditions leave managers in a bind on how to respond to transforming public lands and natural resources. On the most basic level managers have three choices of how to respond: resist change, accept change, or direct change...
thumbnail
The U.S. Northern Rocky Mountains support a large number of native wildlife species, and survival of these populations depends on connected landscapes to support current migration and dispersal, as well as future shifts in species’ ranges. However, habitat fragmentation and loss threaten these connections. Land and wildlife managers across the U.S. are faced with decisions focused on reducing risks, like those from habitat fragmentation, to wildlife, ecosystems, and landscapes. Establishing connections between natural landscapes is a frequently recommended strategy for these managers to help wildlife adapt to changing conditions. Working in partnership with state and federal resource managers and private land...
thumbnail
Amphibians are a group of animals facing especially severe declines due to many factors including climate change and a common pathogen, the amphibian chytrid fungus. To make informed decisions about amphibians, wildlife managers need to identify species facing the greatest threats and the actions that will most effectively minimize impacts of those threats. Although some amphibian species are relatively well-studied, for most, data to inform management decisions are lacking. Therefore, tools to assist managers must be applicable to amphibian species across a range of data availability and susceptibility to climate change and other threats. In this project, researchers will determine which amphibians in the North...
map background search result map search result map Science to Support an Assessment of Future Climate Impacts on Wildlife in Wyoming Informing Adaptation Strategies for Maintaining Landscape Connectivity for Northern Rockies Wildlife Foundational Science Area: Maximizing Stakeholder Engagement to Support Climate Adaptation in the North Central U.S. Supporting the National Park Service Midwest Region Bison Management Plan Understanding Historical and Predicting Future Lake Temperatures in North and South Dakota How and Why Upper Colorado River Basin Land, Water, and Fire Managers Choose to Use Drought Tools Developing and Testing a Rapid Assessment Method for Understanding Key Social Factors of Ecological Drought Preparedness Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks Synthesis of CASC-Led Climate Training Activities for Tribes and Indigenous Communities Assessing the Vulnerability of Native Trout in the Northern Rockies: Linking Science and Management for Climate Adaptation A Framework for Guiding Management Decisions for Amphibians in an Uncertain Future Estimating Future High-Mountain Snowpack to Inform Terrestrial and Aquatic Species Status Assessments, Recovery Plans, and Monitoring A Climate Vulnerability Assessment Framework for Data-Poor Species Training Future Climate Scientists and Researchers Workshops for Facilitating Partnerships and Sharing Information Cross-Park RAD Project (CPRP): A Case Study in Four National Parks Investigating How Institutional Context and Emotions Shape Manager Decisions to Resist, Accept, or Direct Change in Transforming Ecosystems Climate Effects on Prescribed Fire Implementation and Efficacy in Northern Mixed-Grass Prairie What Will Grassland Bird Communities Look Like Under a Changing Climate? Assessing the Impacts of Rangeland Restoration on Carbon Sequestration and Co-Benefits for Drought Resilience in the Sagebrush Steppe and Mixed Grass Prairie Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks Supporting the National Park Service Midwest Region Bison Management Plan How and Why Upper Colorado River Basin Land, Water, and Fire Managers Choose to Use Drought Tools Understanding Historical and Predicting Future Lake Temperatures in North and South Dakota Science to Support an Assessment of Future Climate Impacts on Wildlife in Wyoming Informing Adaptation Strategies for Maintaining Landscape Connectivity for Northern Rockies Wildlife Assessing the Vulnerability of Native Trout in the Northern Rockies: Linking Science and Management for Climate Adaptation Assessing the Impacts of Rangeland Restoration on Carbon Sequestration and Co-Benefits for Drought Resilience in the Sagebrush Steppe and Mixed Grass Prairie Climate Effects on Prescribed Fire Implementation and Efficacy in Northern Mixed-Grass Prairie Estimating Future High-Mountain Snowpack to Inform Terrestrial and Aquatic Species Status Assessments, Recovery Plans, and Monitoring Foundational Science Area: Maximizing Stakeholder Engagement to Support Climate Adaptation in the North Central U.S. A Framework for Guiding Management Decisions for Amphibians in an Uncertain Future A Climate Vulnerability Assessment Framework for Data-Poor Species Training Future Climate Scientists and Researchers Workshops for Facilitating Partnerships and Sharing Information What Will Grassland Bird Communities Look Like Under a Changing Climate? Cross-Park RAD Project (CPRP): A Case Study in Four National Parks Investigating How Institutional Context and Emotions Shape Manager Decisions to Resist, Accept, or Direct Change in Transforming Ecosystems Developing and Testing a Rapid Assessment Method for Understanding Key Social Factors of Ecological Drought Preparedness Synthesis of CASC-Led Climate Training Activities for Tribes and Indigenous Communities