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Abundant scientific research has characterized the relationships between climate and fire in ecosystems of the United States, and there is substantial evidence that the role of fire in ecosystems is likely to change with a changing climate. Changing fire patterns pose numerous natural resource management challenges and decision makers in natural-resource management increasingly require information about potential future changes in fire regimes to effectively prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts. An effective forward-looking fire science synthesis is urgently required to reflect the changing dimensions of human fire management, recognizing that fire causes, effects, impacts, and management are all interrelated...
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Drought events have cost the U.S. nearly $245 billion since 1980, with costs ranging from $2 to $44 billion in any given year. However, these socio-economic losses are not the only impacts of drought. Ecosystems, fish, wildlife, and plants also suffer, and these types of drought impacts are becoming more commonplace. Further, ecosystems that recover from drought are now doing so under different climate conditions than they have experienced in the past few centuries. As temperature and precipitation patterns change, “transformational drought”, or drought events that can permanently and irreversibly alter ecosystems – such as forests converting to grasslands – are a growing threat. This type of drought has cascading...
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Changing climate conditions can make water management planning and drought preparedness decisions more complicated than ever before. Resource managers can no longer rely solely on historical data and trends to base their actions, and are in need of science that is relevant to their specific needs and can directly inform important planning decisions. Questions remain, however, regarding the most effective and efficient methods for extending scientific knowledge and products into management and decision-making. This study analyzed two unique cases of water management to better understand how science can be translated into resource management actions and decision-making. In particular, this project sought to understand...
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Across the western U.S., pinyon and juniper trees are expanding into sagebrush and grassland plant communities. This vegetation change has been perceived to have a significant impact on the economic value of these grasslands, which support activities such as livestock grazing and hunting, but expanding pinyon and juniper forests may also lead to increased risk of fire. Over the past several decades pinyon-juniper forests have been removed across large areas of land to improve wildlife habitat and grazing land productivity while reducing risks of wildland fire. What isn’t known is whether these strategies are effective in reaching this goal, especially given that our future climate will likely be hotter and drier...
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The 2019 Tribal Climate Camp, hosted by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, took place June 16-21, 2019 at the Flathead Lake Biological Station in Polson, Montana. The Tribal Climate Camp was designed to support teams of tribal leaders, climate change coordinators, planners and program managers to build skills, gather information and develop tribal policy needed to address climate change impacts. This week-long program helped build individual and team capacity to lead and manage for climate change and adaptation across departments within a tribe, and between tribes and partner agencies and organizations. Participants included tribal climate change staff, policy leaders, Tribal Council, natural resource...
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The National Park Service is responsible for managing livestock grazing on 94 locations across the country and several grazing management planning efforts for this work are underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management plans to address potential future effects of climate change on related resources and practices. This is the second phase of a project that is using scenario planning (a strategic planning technique used to inform decision-making in the face of uncertain future conditions) to support grazing management at Dinosaur National Monument. In the first phase of the project (Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks), the research team...
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In the North Central U.S., drought is a dominant driver of ecological, economic, and social stress. Drought conditions have occurred in the region due to lower precipitation, extended periods of high temperatures and evaporative demand, or a combination of these factors. This project aimed to improve our understanding of drought in the North Central region and determine what future droughts might look like over the 21st century, as climate conditions change. Researchers evaluated, with the intent to improve, available and emerging data on climate conditions that influence drought (such as changes in temperature, precipitation, evaporative demand, snow and soil moisture), as well as datasets related to the surface...
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The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is an expansive region that covers parts of five Midwestern states and three Canadian provinces. This region contains millions of wetlands in which waterfowl breed and from which 50-80% of the continent's migratory ducks originate each year. Previous modeling efforts indicated that climate change would result in a shift of suitable waterfowl breeding habitat from the central PPR to the southeastern portion of the region, an area where the majority of wetlands have been drained. If this future scenario were to materialize, a significant restoration effort would be needed in the southeastern PPR to support waterfowl production. However, more recent research has revealed...
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Managers already face uncertainty when making decisions about how to best manage natural resources. Now, climate change is adding an additional level of complexity to resource management decisions. Understanding the ability of human and ecological communities to adapt to changing conditions (known as their adaptive capacity) is an integral component of effective management planning in the face of climate change. So too is identifying ways in which managers can better incorporate information on climate and the vulnerability of resources into their decision-making. This project sought to improve decision-making in the North Central region by developing an approach to managing natural resources that acknowledges...
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Tribal nations are priority science partners of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) and the center is committed to working with Tribal partners to create usable, and relevant science to build resilience to anthropogenic climate change. The NC CASC recognizes the importance and value of Indigenous Knowledges in addressing environmental challenges and any tribal projects funded through NC CASC follow the Guidelines for Considering Indigenous Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives to ensure data sovereignty and best practices for working with sovereign Tribal Nations. To better understand, support, and facilitate climate resilience in Tribal communities, the NC CASC co-hosts a regional...
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In ecosystems characterized by flowing water, such as rivers and streams, the dynamics of how the water moves - how deep it is, how fast it flows, how often it floods - have direct effects on the health, diversity, and sustainability of underlying communities. Yet increasingly, climate extremes like droughts and floods are disrupting fragile stream ecosystems by specifically changing their internal aquatic flows. Human infrastructure, such as irrigation and dams, further disrupt these dynamics. These changes in climate and land use are leading to teh fragmentation of aquatic habtiat, degraded water quality, altered sediment transport processes, variation in the timing and duration of floodplain inundation, shifts...
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The Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming is home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, who reside near and depend on water from the streams that feed into the Wind River. In recent years, however, the region has experienced frequent severe droughts, which have impacted tribal livelihoods and cultural activities. Scientists with the North Central Climate Science Center at Colorado State University, the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and several other university and agency partners are working closely with tribal water managers to assess how drought affects the reservation, integrating social, ecological, and hydro-climatological sciences...
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Hydrologic models are used throughout the world to forecast and simulate streamflow, inform water management, municipal planning, and ecosystem conservation, and investigate potential effects of climate and land-use change on hydrology. The USGS Modeling of Watershed Systems (MoWS) group is currently developing the infrastructure for a National Hydrologic Model (NHM) to support coordinated, comprehensive, and consistent hydrologic model development and application. The NHM is expected to provide internally consistent estimates of total water availability, water sources, and streamflow timing, and measures of uncertainty around these estimates, for the entire United States. VisTrails, a scientific workflow and provenance...
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Colorado State University organized and hosted a workshop aimed at developing an information technology framework for data integration related to climate change impacts on ecosystems and landscape conservation. The workshop included key federal and state agency partners, tribal governments, and universities. The objective of the workshop was to develop an information technology strategy to handle the various data, information, and computational services which the eight regional DOI Climate Science Centers will be responsible for delivering to stakeholders. Issues covered during the workshop included distributed computing and data storage; information security issues across federal, state, university, and public...
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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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The NC CASC supports co-produced actionable science, data-intensive discovery, and open science to support tribal, federal, state, and local natural resource managers and decision-makers in the North Central region, which serves Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. NC CASC is hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences , and is a partnership between CU Boulder, the U.S. Geological Survey, and five consortium partners: University of Montana; South Dakota State University; Conservation Science Partners; Wildlife Conservation Society; and Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance. During the period...
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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the largest area of public lands in the United States. Decision-making on BLM lands is complex because managers have to balance diverse, sometimes conflicting, resources, uses, and values. Land managers are more likely to achieve long-term land management goals and balance multiple desired uses and values across public landscapes when their decisions are informed by the best available science, including climate science. Strengthening the use of science and climate information in federal decision making is a priority for the current administration and for federal agencies, including the BLM. The Climate Adaptation Science Centers are committed to developing climate science...
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Even when faced with uncertainty about future climate conditions, resource managers are tasked with making planning and adaptation decisions that impact important natural and cultural resources. Species distribution models are widely used by both researchers and managers to estimate species responses to climate change. These models combine data on environmental variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation) with field samples of a species’ presence, absence, and/or abundance to project and visualize potential habitat of the species across space and time. However, species distribution modeling software previously developed and supported by USGS (the Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling [SAHM] package for VisTrails)...
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Climate change is poised to alter natural systems, the frequency of extreme weather, and human health and livelihoods. In order to effectively prepare for and respond to these challenges in the north-central region of the U.S., people must have the knowledge and tools to develop plans and adaptation strategies. This project was a continuation of an effort begun in 2013 to build stakeholders’ capacity to respond to climate change in the north-central U.S. During the course of this project, researchers focused on two major activities: Tribal Capacity Building: Researchers provided tribal colleges and universities with mini-grants to develop student projects to document climate-related changes in weather and culturally...
map background search result map search result map Data Integration for Landscape Conservation Workshop Incorporating Adaptive Capacity into Decision-Making in the North Central U.S. Developing a VisTrails Platform for Modeling Streamflow Hydrology and Projecting Climate Change Effects on Streamflow Foundational Science Area: Developing Climate Change Understanding and Resources for Adaptation in the North Central U.S. The Wind River Indian Reservation’s Vulnerability to the Impacts of Drought and the Development of Decision Tools to Support Drought Preparedness Continued Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement and PhenoCam Analysis Climate-Driven Shifts in Prairie Pothole Wetlands: Assessing Future Impacts to Critical Waterfowl Habitats Identifying Characteristics of Actionable Science for Drought Planning and Adaptation Support for the 2019 Tribal Climate Camp State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by The University of Colorado Boulder (2018-2023) Future of Fire: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Support for Tribal Partners Modeling to Support Grazing Management Planning in U.S. National Parks: A Case Study from Dinosaur National Monument Developing A New Software Package to Enhance Species Distribution Model Functionality State of the Science in Streamflow Modeling in the North Central Region to Address Partner Needs for Water Availability Under Drought Conditions Developing a Decision Support Framework for Prioritizing Pinyon Juniper Forest Treatments on the Colorado Plateau Providing a Climate Science Foundation for Updating the Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy Actionable Science Plan Future of Aquatic Flows: Towards a National Synthesis of Streamflow Regimes Under a Changing Climate Short Science Syntheses and NEPA Analyses for Climate-Informed Land Management Decisions in Sagebrush Rangelands The Wind River Indian Reservation’s Vulnerability to the Impacts of Drought and the Development of Decision Tools to Support Drought Preparedness Developing a Decision Support Framework for Prioritizing Pinyon Juniper Forest Treatments on the Colorado Plateau Support for the 2019 Tribal Climate Camp State of the Science in Streamflow Modeling in the North Central Region to Address Partner Needs for Water Availability Under Drought Conditions Data Integration for Landscape Conservation Workshop Incorporating Adaptive Capacity into Decision-Making in the North Central U.S. Foundational Science Area: Developing Climate Change Understanding and Resources for Adaptation in the North Central U.S. Continued Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement and PhenoCam Analysis Identifying Characteristics of Actionable Science for Drought Planning and Adaptation North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by The University of Colorado Boulder (2018-2023) Support for Tribal Partners Developing A New Software Package to Enhance Species Distribution Model Functionality Climate-Driven Shifts in Prairie Pothole Wetlands: Assessing Future Impacts to Critical Waterfowl Habitats Providing a Climate Science Foundation for Updating the Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy Actionable Science Plan Short Science Syntheses and NEPA Analyses for Climate-Informed Land Management Decisions in Sagebrush Rangelands Developing a VisTrails Platform for Modeling Streamflow Hydrology and Projecting Climate Change Effects on Streamflow State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country Future of Fire: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Future of Aquatic Flows: Towards a National Synthesis of Streamflow Regimes Under a Changing Climate