Filters: Tags: land resources (X)
27 results (40ms)|
Filters
Date Range
Extensions Types
Contacts
Categories Tag Types
|
Advancing our mechanistic understanding of ecosystem responses to climate change is critical to improve ecological theories, develop predictive models to simulate ecosystem processes, and inform sound policies to manage ecosystems and human activities. Manipulation of temperature in the field, or the “ecosystem warming experiment,” has proved to be a powerful tool to understand ecosystem responses to changes in temperature. No comprehensive synthesis has been conducted since the last one more than 10 years ago. A new synthetic analysis is critically needed to advance our understanding of ecosystem responses to warming, to highlight experimental artifacts and appropriate interpretations, and to guide development...
Categories: Data,
Project;
Types: Downloadable,
GeoTIFF,
Map Service,
Raster;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Ecosystems,
Land Resources
Tropical forests contain > 50% of the world’s known species (Heywood 1995), 55% of global forest biomass (Pan et al. 2011), and exchange more carbon (C), water and energy with the atmosphere than any other ecosystem type (e.g., Saugier et al. 2001). Despite their importance, there is more uncertainty associated with predictions of how tropical forests will respond to warming than for any other biome (Randerson et al. 2009). This uncertainty is of global concern due to the large quantity of C cycled by these forests and the high potential for biodiversity loss. Given the importance of tropical forests, decision makers and land managers around the globe need increased predictive capacity regarding how tropical forests...
Categories: Data,
Project;
Types: Downloadable,
GeoTIFF,
Map Service,
Raster;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Climate,
Ecosystems,
Forests,
Nitrogen deposition is altering forest dynamics, terrestrial carbon storage, and biodiversity. However, our ability to forecast how different tree species will respond to N deposition, especially key response thresholds, is limited by a lack of synthesis across spatial scales and research approaches. To develop our best understanding of N deposition impact on tree growth and survival, we will integrate plot-‐ level studies describing plant growth and survival responses to N inputs and plant-‐ available soil nutrients with a continental scale analysis across a N deposition gradient. Our primary outcome will be estimates of tree response to N deposition with explicit representation of uncertainty and the identification...
Soils are a vast reservoir of organic carbon (C), rendering the fate of soil C an important control on the global climate system. Widespread changes in soil C storage capacity present a potentially strong feedback to global change. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of how soil C will respond to climate and/or land use disturbance remains illusive, resulting in major uncertainties in global climate models. Our working group will synthesize information on the processes controlling soil C storage across different spatial scales and develop new procedures to translate local measurements to the regional and global scale datasets used by models. These activities will improve our ability to map the vulnerability of soil...
Wetlands provide many important ecosystem services, including wildlife habitat, water purification, flood protection, and carbon metabolism. Our ability to manage these services and predict the long-term health of wetlands is strongly linked to their carbon fluxes, of which methane (CH4) is a key component. Natural wetlands emit approximately 30% of global CH4 emissions, as their waterlogged soils create ideal conditions for CH4 production. They are also the largest, and potentially most uncertain, natural source of CH4 to the atmosphere. To understand and predict CH4 fluxes across wetlands globally, we propose the first synthesis of CH4 flux tower data accompanying a global database of CH4 emissions. By taking...
Categories: Project;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Ecosystems,
Energy and Minerals,
Land Resources,
Natural resource managers are coping with rapid changes in both environmental conditions and ecosystems. Enabled by recent advances in data collection and assimilation, short-term ecological forecasting may be a powerful tool to help resource managers anticipate impending changes in ecosystem dynamics (that is, the approaching near-term changes in ecosystems). Managers may use the information in forecasts to minimize the adverse effects of ecological stressors and optimize the effectiveness of management actions. To explore the potential for ecological forecasting to enhance natural resource management, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) convened a workshop titled “Building capacity for Applied Short-Term Ecological...
Categories: Project;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Ecological Forecasting,
Ecosystems,
Land Resources,
Estimating species response to environmental change is a key challenge for ecologists and a core mission of the USGS. Effective forecasting of species response requires models that are detailed enough to capture critical processes and at the same time general enough to allow broad application. This tradeoff is difficult to reconcile with most existing methods. We propose to extend and combine existing models that operate at different scales and with different levels of data complexity into a modeling framework that will allow robust estimation of population response to environmental change across a species’ range. This integrated modeling is now possible with the increasing development and application of population...
Ecosystem services - the benefits that nature provides to society and the economy - are gaining increasing traction worldwide as governments and the private sector use them to monitor integrated environmental and economic trends. When they are well understood and managed, ecosystems can provide these long-term benefits to people - such as clean air and water, flood control, crop pollination, and recreational, cultural, and aesthetic benefits. Within the U.S. government, a memo issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in October 2015 charged agencies with incorporating these values in planning, investment, and regulatory processes. Natural capital accounting - a tool being used in dozens of countries...
Categories: Project;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Biology and Ecosystems,
Ecosystem Services,
Ecosystems,
This dataset contains information regarding the acreages of land currently (as of 2004) enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) distributed by county and the year the CRP contract was initiated (1987-2004, excluding 1994 and 1995). Additionally, it contains total acreages of land enrolled in the CRP distributed by county and the contract year (1987-2003). USDA Farm Service Agency's (FSA) Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a voluntary program available to agricultural producers to help them safeguard environmentally sensitive land. Producers enrolled in CRP plant long-term, resource-conserving covers to improve the quality of water, control soil erosion, and enhance wildlife habitat. In return, FSA...
Categories: Data,
pre-SM502.8;
Types: Downloadable,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
Shapefile;
Tags: Arizona,
CRP,
California,
Colorado,
Colorado Plateau,
Resilience science provides a conceptual framework and methodology for quantitatively assessing the ability of a system to remain in a particular state. Probable non-linear ecological responses to global change, including climate change, require a clear framework for understanding and managing resilience. However, much of the resilience research to date has been qualitative in nature, and frameworks developed for the implementation of resilience science have been either vague or focused on the social component of social-ecological systems. Attempts to quantify resilience and operationalize the concept include the cross-scale resilience model, discontinuity theory and the early detection of leading indicators of...
The pervasive nature of insect species’ declines has led to the specter of an “Insect Armageddon” in the popular press. Insect-derived ecosystem services are valued at > $57 billion in the U.S. and thus the loss of insects has the potential to fundamentally disrupt natural and economic systems.The causes of insect declines have been linked to changes in climate, land use and pesticide use, but there is little consensus on the relative importance of these drivers. There is even less consensus about which species are at most risk and about how to mitigate declines and recover populations. Systematic evaluations of trends across insect taxa in North America are needed as there are none based on systematic monitoring...
Forecasting Mosquito Phenology in a Shifting Climate: Synthesizing Continental-scale Monitoring Data
Climate change is expected to have significant effects on the phenology of vectors of arthropod-borne diseases, particularly mosquitoes. However, forecasting the direction and magnitude of future phenological shifts requires a more detailed understanding of the climate drivers of mosquito phenology. Addressing this knowledge gap is particularly salient for mosquitoes, as they have the potential to affect human health through transmission of zoonotic disease. While models based on climate and mosquito life history have been created at local or regional scales, national-scale predictions of the timing of mosquito activity are not readily available for the U.S. Our workshop proposes to synthesize primary data on mosquito...
While it is widely recognized that microorganisms are intimately linked with every biogeochemical cycle in all ecosystems, it is not clear how and when microbial dynamics constrain ecosystem processes. As a result, it is know clear how to apply the value of increasingly detailed characterization of microbial properties to our understanding of ecosystem ecology. Several recent papers have demonstrated how information about microbial dynamics can be incorporated into ecosystem models (Allison et al. 2010, McGuire and Treseder 2010, Todd - Brown et al. 2011a), but it is generally not clear what types of microbial data are most useful in explaining variation in biogeochemical processes and ecosystem functioning, especially...
The transport of dissolved organic matter (DOM) by rivers is an important component of the global carbon cycle, affects ecosystems and water quality, and reflects biogeochemical and hydrological processes in watersheds. Understanding the fundamental relationships between discharge and DOM concentration and composition reveals important information about watershed flow paths, soil flushing, connectivity to riparian zones, organic matter leaching, soil moisture, and climatic influences. Data to describe these processes - both magnitude and timing - is critical for modeling and predicting watershed DOM dynamics, particularly in light of land use and climate change . Despite several decades of data collection, a synthesis...
Categories: Data,
Project;
Tags: All Working Groups,
Completed,
Land Resources,
River,
Water Resources,
These data were released prior to the October 1, 2016 effective date for the USGS’s policy dictating the review, approval, and release of scientific data as referenced in USGS Survey Manual Chapter 502.8 Fundamental Science Practices: Review and Approval of Scientific Data for Release. The enhanced National Land Cover Data 1992 ("NLCDe 92") served as the primary source for nationally consistent mapped land cover during the first decade of sampling for the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This 30-meter (30-m) resolution digital map was developed by overlaying USGS's original satellite imagery-based 1992 National Land Cover Data ("NLCD 92") with selected classifications...
Streamflow is declining in many parts of the United States (US) due to factors including groundwater pumping, land use change, and climate change. Streamflow depletion, a reduction in groundwater discharge to a stream due to human activities such as pumping and/or land use change, tends to evolve slowly and can be entirely invisible for many years to decades. This is because streamflow depletion can be masked by the natural and/or climate change-induced variability in streamflow, and groundwater storage can buffer the impacts on streams. The negative effects on both anthropogenic and ecological systems can evolve over decades or more, and specific causes and potential solutions to these issues are often difficult...
Forests sequester the majority of the terrestrial biosphere’s carbon and are key components of the global carbon cycle, potentially contributing substantial feedbacks to ongoing climatic changes. It is therefore remarkable that no consensus yet exists about the fundamental nature of tree mass growth (and thus carbon sequestration rate). Specifically, does tree mass growth rate increase, decrease, or stay the same with increasing tree size? The answer could have profound implications for our ability to forecast the role of forests in the global carbon cycle and to devise appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies for forests in the face of rapid climatic changes. We will conduct the first global-scale characterization...
The three-dimensional (3D) form of the Earth’s surface results from both abiotic and biotic forces. Major abiotic forces, such as tectonic uplift, erosion, and climate, exert strong influence over land surface morphology. Biotic forces, including, significantly, humans, also shape the landscape, but often at different temporal and spatial scales and magnitudes than geologic forces. Because the processes shaping the land surface, as expressed in its topography, are ongoing, topographic change is ever present and is a factor that must be broadly considered in studies of natural and built environments. Remote sensing data, especially in the form of derived high-resolution measurements of the topography, have been widely...
Categories: Project;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Land Resources,
Land Resources,
Land Resources,
USGS PRISM (Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping) Project global data sets of Pliocene conditions, which form the most comprehensive global reconstruction for any warm period prior to the recent past, are used to drive numerical climate model simulations designed to explore the impact of climate forcings and feedbacks during the Pliocene. The Pliocene world provides an unequaled paleo-‐laboratory to test the sensitivity of the physical models that estimate the impacts of future warming and challenges our understanding of the sensitivity of key components of the climate system and how they are simulated (e.g., polar vs. tropical sensitivity, the role of ocean circulation in a warming climate, the...
This proposal brings together biologists and geoscientists to evaluate the evolution of stress tolerance and adaptation to extreme environments in plants. Stress tolerance has been studied mainly from a physiological perspective using laboratory and field experiments. In contrast, this project will take a combined environmental and evolutionary perspective using national public databases and a “big data” approach. Thus the proposal will illustrate an application of spatially integrated big datasets for basic research, a synthesis goal of the Powell Center. We will use the geochemical and mineralogical data from the USGS Soil Geochemical Landscapes of the Conterminous United States Project, digital elevation and...
Categories: Data,
Project;
Tags: Active,
All Working Groups,
Ecosystems,
Energy and Minerals,
Land Resources,
|
|
