Final Report: Foundational Science Area: Climate Adaptation Strategies for Wildlife and Habitats in the North Central U.S.

In the previous first phase of the Impacts and Vulnerability project, we made substantial progress in assessing climate and land use change impacts across the NCCASC domain. These include: quantifying the rates of land use change in greater wildland ecosystems (GWEs), determining the extent of fragmentation in major ecosystems across GWEs, assessing climate change impacts on public, private, and tribal lands within GWEs, evaluating evaporative demands across hydroclimatic gradients of eight ecoregions across north central U.S., and predicting forest ecosystem responses to climate change. We found that rates of climate and land use change varied across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, as did the responses of...

Tags: Forests, Greater Wildland Ecosystem, Landscapes, Mammals, North Central CASC, All tags... Other Landscapes, Wildlife and Plants, climate impacts, fragmentation in major ecosystems, hydroclimatic gradients, land use, Fewer tags