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The southeastern U.S. contains a unique diversity of ecosystems that provide important benefits, including habitat for rare wildlife and plants, improved water quality, and recreation opportunities. Understanding how climate change will affect these ecosystems is vital for knowing how best to protect them and the services they supply. The goal of this project was to assess the climate change vulnerability of 12 key ecosystems in the southeastern U.S. and Caribbean, ranging from Caribbean coastal mangrove to Nashville Basin limestone glade and woodland. Scientists used the existing scientific literature and geospatial analysis to determine each ecosystem’s sensitivity to changes in climate, its exposure level to...
Extreme events such as heat waves, cold spells, floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, and tornadoes have potentially devastating impacts on natural and engineered systems and human communities worldwide. Stakeholder decisions about critical infrastructures, natural resources, emergency preparedness and humanitarian aid typically need to be made at local to regional scales over seasonal to decadal planning horizons. However, credible climate change attribution and reliable projections at more localized and shorter time scales remain grand challenges. Long-standing gaps include inadequate understanding of processes such as cloud physics and ocean–land–atmosphere interactions, limitations of physics-based computer models,...
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This shapefile contains polygons representing the current range of twelve ecosystems in the southeastern U.S. and the Caribbean. These were the focal ecosystems for the research project. The polygons were created by digitizing a representative area that contained each ecosystem's extent, as defined from GAP land cover or NatureServe's National Map land cover data.
Abstract (from http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1806/20142608): The amount of energy consumed within an average city block is an order of magnitude higher than that consumed in any other ecosystem over a similar area. This is driven by human food inputs, but the consequence of these resources for urban animal populations is poorly understood. We investigated the role of human foods in ant diets across an urbanization gradient in Manhattan using carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes. We found that some—but not all—ant species living in Manhattan's most urbanized habitats had δ13C signatures associated with processed human foods. In particular, pavement ants ( Tetramorium sp. E) had increased levels...
Abstract (from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0102261): The future health of ecosystems is arguably as dependent on urban sprawl as it is on human-caused climatic warming. Urban sprawl strongly impacts the urban ecosystems it creates and the natural and agro-ecosystems that it displaces and fragments. Here, we project urban sprawl changes for the next 50 years for the fast-growing Southeast U.S. Previous studies have focused on modeling population density, but the urban extent is arguably as important as population density per se in terms of its ecological and conservation impacts. We develop simulations using the SLEUTH urban growth model that complement population-driven models...
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In partnership with South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative members, we assessed current and projected connectivity for three species that inhabit bottomland hardwoods throughout the southeastern US: black bear (Ursus americanus), Rafinesque’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinus rafinesquii), timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). For each species, we mapped important habitat connections between core patches of habitat using three different modeling approaches (Connectivity Analysis Toolkit (CAT), Circuitscape, and Linkage Mapper) that incorporated three types of resistance layers (expert opinion, niche modeling, and empirical data for the black bear only). The result was 21 sets of important connections, one...
The Interior Department’s Climate Science Centers, managed by USGS, are helping the National Park Service pinpoint the specific impacts of climate change on parks and their cultural and natural resources. Doing so will help managers answer a critical question: which resources will require human intervention to ensure their continued existence?
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Estimates of water flows in streams are critical to inform natural resource managers of water availability for both human and ecological needs. Monitoring flow in the stream using a streamgage provides information about the amount and timing of surface water resources. However, not every stream has a streamgage and decisions about water resources may need to be made in a watershed where there is no flow information. Hydrologic models can be used to provide estimates of streamflow in the absence of streamflow information. These models depend upon available streamflow data for calibration, and can be very inaccurate without the use of those data. This research developed a method to group watersheds that are gaged...
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Sea level rise is likely to be a major driver of coastal habitat change in the coming decades, and therefore influence the location and magnitude of ecosystem services provided by coastal habitats. We used a spatial model to map coastal habitat changes due to sea level rise in six mid-Atlantic states, including North Carolina, and translate habitat changes into effects on net carbon flux from the coastal zone.
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Publicly accessible open spaces provide valuable opportunities for people to exercise, play, socialize, and build community. People are more likely to use public open spaces that are close (ideally within walking distance) to their homes. To assess the spatial distribution of access to open space for recreation in the southeastern United States, we constructed an index of open space access based on the size of the largest publicly accessible open space within 10 miles of each point on the landscape, using three distance categories to represent whether people can reach the open spaces by walking (within 0.5 mile), via a short drive (within 3 miles), or via a longer drive (within 10 miles). Using the open space access...
Reserve design is a process that must address many ecological, social, and political factors to successfully identify parcels of land in need of protection to sustain wildlife populations and other natural resources. Making land acquisition choices for a large, terrestrial protected area is difficult because it occurs over a long timeframe and may involve consideration of future conditions such as climate and urbanization changes. Decision makers need to consider factors including: order of parcel purchasing given budget constraints, future uncertainty, potential future landscape-scale changes from urbanization and climate. In central Florida, two new refuges and the expansion of a third refuge are in various stages...
UNCERTAINTY IS ALWAYS PRESENT in conservation and other socio-ecological decisions, which can make choices uncomfortable and challenging. All choices have consequences – including the choice to do nothing. This fact sheet discusses the pervasiveness of uncertainty, the importance of understanding varying perceptions of uncertainty, and avenues for progress in the presence of uncertainty and differing risk tolerances.
Conservation practitioners must navigate many challenges to advance effective naturalresource management in the presence of multiple uncertainties. Numerous climatic and ecological changes remain on the horizon, and their eventual consequences are not completely understood. Even so, their influences are expected to impact important resources and the people that depend on them across local, regional, and sometimes global scales. Although forecasts of future conditions are almost always imperfect, decision makers are increasingly expected to communicate and use uncertain information when making policy choices that affect multiple user groups. The degree to which management objectives are met can depend on 1) how critical...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Trees are important components of urban landscapes because of the ecosystem services they provide. However, the effects of urbanization, particularly high temperatures, can benefit chronic insect pests and threaten ecosystem services offered by urban trees. Urban forest fragments are an often-overlooked component of the greater urban forest which may help to mitigate the damaging effects of urbanization. Melanaspis tenebricosa (gloomy scale) is a common pest of Acer rubrum(red maple) that becomes more abundant because of the urban heat island effect. We conducted observational and manipulative field experiments to test the hypothesis that trees in urban forest fragments would be cooler...
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Much of the biodiversity of the southeastern U.S. is found in grasslands, including meadows, prairies, glades, and savannas. These grasslands provide vital habitat to a variety of plants and animals, but many grassland types have undergone over 90% loss due to fire suppression and urban sprawl. The remaining grassland patches—remnants—now face emerging threats from invasive species and climate change. The project researchers recently convened a workshop with grassland managers and experts from across the Southeast, from Texas to West Virginia to Florida, to identify the most pressing science needs to effectively manage and restore grasslands over the coming decades. This project directly addresses those needs by...
Climate in the southeastern U.S. is predicted to be changing at a slower rate than other parts of North America; however, land use change associated with urbanization is having a significant effect on wildlife populations and habitat availability. We sought to understand the effect of global warming on both beneficial and pest insects of trees. We used urban warming as a proxy for global warming in as much as many cities have already warmed as much, due to heat island effects, as they are expected to warm due to climate change by 2050 or even 2100. We were able to develop good predictive models of how warming influences beneficial and pest insects for cities in the Southeast and across the east coast more generally....
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The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is a familiar species across the southeastern Coastal Plain, but its population has declined significantly over the decades. One reason is that much of its primary habitat, sparse stands of mature pine, has been replaced by development or agriculture. Another is that periodic ground fires, which are important for providing needed forage for the tortoise, have been largely suppressed on the landscape. The gopher tortoise is a “keystone” species, meaning that its disappearance from the landscape would jeopardize the existence of many other species that make use of its underground burrows. Besides tortoise habitat, the uplands of the Coastal Plain contain isolated seasonal...
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Grasslands are plant communities that have few or no trees, or have open canopies that allow for the development of a grassy groundcover. Grasslands in the southeastern U.S. support rare plant and animal species and in some cases qualify as global or regional hotspots of biodiversity. Yet the Southeast’s grasslands have been reduced by approximately 90% since European settlement, as the result of agriculture, urbanization, and fire suppression. Today, climate change represents an additional stressor that may pose direct and indirect threats to grassland-related biodiversity. Additional knowledge is urgently needed to evaluate conservation options for species of conservation concern in southeastern U.S. grasslands,...
map background search result map search result map Assessing Climate-Sensitive Ecosystems in the Southeastern U.S. Science to Support Adaptive Landscape Planning and Decision Making for Gopher Tortoise Conservation Focal Ecosystems Key landscape connections under climate change Estimating Future Water Availability and Streamflow in the Southeast Clarifying Science Needs for Southeastern Grasslands Conservation Priorities for Open Space Recreation Access Understanding Impacts on Southeastern Grasslands from Climate Change, Urban Expansion, and Invasive Species Effects of Sea Level Rise on Coastal Habitats and Blue Carbon Science to Support Adaptive Landscape Planning and Decision Making for Gopher Tortoise Conservation Estimating Future Water Availability and Streamflow in the Southeast Effects of Sea Level Rise on Coastal Habitats and Blue Carbon Understanding Impacts on Southeastern Grasslands from Climate Change, Urban Expansion, and Invasive Species Conservation Priorities for Open Space Recreation Access Key landscape connections under climate change Assessing Climate-Sensitive Ecosystems in the Southeastern U.S. Clarifying Science Needs for Southeastern Grasslands Focal Ecosystems