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This project consisted of two principal components: (1) A climatological analysis of burn conditions (2) A forum to discuss fire risk and management practices The climatological study included seasonality and inter-annual variability and potential changes due to increasing temperatures. The regional forum engaged stakeholders in a discussion of the use of prescribed fire in a safe and effective manner.
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Climate projections for the southern Great Plains, and elsewhere in the U.S., indicate that a hotter future with changes in precipitation amount and seasonality is to be expected. As plants become stressed from these changes, wildfire risk increases. One of the most valuable approaches to reducing the impacts of wildfires is fuel reduction through prescribed burns. Fuel reduction helps minimize the destruction of ecological communities, threats of future flooding, and extensive damages by lessening the intensity of future wildfires. Although safe burning practices can largely minimize the risks, prescribed burns may bring some degree of concern among practitioners. The real and perceived risks may include bodily...
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The sky island forests of the southwestern United States are one of the most diverse temperate forest ecosystems in the world, providing key habitat for migrating and residential species alike. Black bear, bighorn sheep, mule deer, and wild turkey are just a few of the species found in these isolated mountain ecosystems that rise out of the desert landscape. However, recent droughts have crippled these ecosystems, causing significant tree death. Climate predictions suggest that this region will only face hotter and drier conditions in the future, potentially stressing these ecosystems even further. Simple models predict that vegetation will move to cooler and wetter locations in response to this warming. However,...
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Wildfire, drought, and insects are reshaping forests in the Western United States in a manner that is being exacerbated by warming temperatures. Disturbance events such as these can significantly alter the amount of land that is covered by forest in an area or region. Consequently, changes in forest cover from disturbance can impact water runoff conditions leading to dangerous flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. These events can be costly for society. In response, many land managers are using forest thinning and prescribed burning practices to reduce disturbance impacts, especially those that are caused by high-severity wildfire. In contrast to the wealth of research on the advantages of forest thinning...
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The threat of droughts and their associated impacts on the landscape and human communities has long been recognized in the United States, especially in high risk areas such as the South Central region. There is ample literature on the effects of long-term climate change and short-term climate variability on the occurrence of droughts. However, it is unclear whether this information meets the needs of relevant stakeholders and actually contributes to reducing the vulnerability or increasing the resilience of communities to droughts. For example, are the methods used to characterize the severity of drought – known as drought indices – effective tools for predicting the actual damage felt by communities? As droughts...
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The South Central U.S. encompasses a wide range of ecosystem types and precipitation patterns. Average annual precipitation is less than 10 inches in northwest New Mexico but can exceed 60 inches further east in Louisiana. Much of the region relies on warm-season convective precipitation – that is, highly localized brief but intense periods of rainfall that are common in the summer. This type of precipitation is a significant driver of climate and ecosystem function in the region, but it is also notoriously difficult to predict since it occurs at such small spatial and temporal scales. While global climate models are helpful for understanding and predicting large-scale precipitation trends, they often do not capture...
Chelenzo Farms, located twenty miles south of the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a regenerative farm that applies permaculture, soil health, and agroecology principles. It has three operating principles of research, education, and community. It practices dryland farming, focusing on the cultivation of agave and native plants. With over 200 varieties, agave can be distilled to make liquor, fermented for livestock feed, and made into textiles. In fact, 75% of those varieties have been cultivated in Mexico for thousands of years. Thus, agaves have long supported a variety of pollinators in the Southwest and along the border with Mexico in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, with the best known one being the...
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Drought is a common consequence of climate variability in the south-central U.S., but they are expected to occur more often and become more intense with climate change. Natural resource managers can improve their planning efforts with advance warnings of impending drought. Using input from resource managers in the Chickasaw Nation, this research team previously created models that forecast droughts up to 18 months in advance with information about their expected timing and intensity. Developed for all climate divisions in Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, these drought models rely on input from predictor variables associated with global weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña. However, it is unclear...
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The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) has several Communities of Practice (CoPs) focused on resource manager needs across the region (e.g. understanding at-risk species and ecosystems, building resilient coastal ecosystems, extreme weather and climate change, etc.). Each CoP has expertise in the subject matter and has been working on projects that are relevant to the resource community, including conducting literature reviews and small-scale pilot projects. The current research project will leverage the expertise of the existing CoPs to enhance the content available through the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) as identified through the partnership between the South Central...
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The South Central U.S. is one of the main agricultural regions in North America: annual agricultural production is valued at more than $44 billion dollars. However, as climate conditions change, the region is experiencing more frequent and severe droughts, with significant impacts on agriculture and broader consequences for land management. For example, in 2011 drought caused an estimated $7.6 billion in agricultural losses in Texas and an additional $1.6 billion in Oklahoma. Although there are many drought monitoring tools available, most of these tools were developed without input from the stakeholders, such as farmers and ranchers, who are intended to use them. The goal of this project was to assess the information...
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Scientists, planners, policy makers and other decision-makers in the South Central U.S. want to understand the potential impacts of changes in climate, precipitation, and land-use patterns on natural and cultural resources. Though the potential impacts of climate change can be modeled to help decision-makers plan for future conditions, these models rarely incorporate changes in land-use that may occur. Climate change and land-use change are often linked, as shifts in precipitation and temperature can alter patterns in human land-use activities, such as agriculture. This project sought to address this gap by developing new software tools that enable stakeholders to quickly develop custom, climate-sensitive land-use...
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Pollinator restoration requires information about what species to plant and when to plant them to ensure food sources are available throughout the periods when pollinators are active. Changes in climate, including earlier spring warming and warmer fall temperatures, may cause flowering to become out of sync with pollinator activity. When restoring land to support pollinators, managers are challenged to select a mix of species that support pollinators of concern throughout their periods of activity. Existing planting tools have several disadvantages such as, their usability is location specific, they are virtually non-existent for the South Central region, and they do not often account for future changes in plant...
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A limited amount of valid scientific information about global climate change and its detrimental impacts has reached the public and exerted a positive impact on the public policy process or future planning for adaptation and mitigation. This project was designed to address this limitation by bringing together expertise in the social and communication sciences from targeted academic institutions affiliated with the Department of the Interior’s Climate Science Centers (CSCs) through a workshop. The project team brought together expertise in the social and communication sciences from targeted academic institutions, particularly experts and scholars who are affiliated with the nation’s CSCs, by means of an invited...
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In the Western U.S., approximately 65% of the water supply comes from forested regions with most of the water that feeds local rivers coming from snowmelt that originates in mountain forests. The Rio Grande headwaters (I.e. the primary water generating region of the Rio Grande river) is experiencing large changes to the landscape primarily from forest fires and bark beetle infestations. Already, 85% of the coniferous forests in this region have been affected by the bark beetle, and projections indicate greater changes will occur as temperatures increase. In this area, most of the precipitation falls as snow in the winter, reaches a maximum depth in the late spring, and melts away due to warmer temperatures by early...
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This dataset contains the input files, script, and output files regarding 110 years of daily regulated (observed) and naturalized streamflow (million cubic meters/day) for ten gauge stations in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin. The gauge stations included are at Amistad, Anzalduas, Artesia, Below Presidio, Laredo, Conchos Outlet, Foster Ranch, Laredo, Pecos Outlet, Salado River, and San Juan River.
Conservative agricultural management strategies pursue long-term ecological benefits through practices such as no-tillage, cover crop, and inherent soil properties management. Farmers, however, are often hesitant to adopt such practices due to lack of experience, initial expense, and concern for low crop productivity. Overcoming this barrier requires novel approaches, such as effectively managing the soil microbiome to attain high productivity at a low cost, especially in a semi-arid region. To study the potential of conservation agriculture, we investigated components of soil bacterial community and rhizobial diversity in long-term experimental cotton fields divided into conventional tillage monoculture systems...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Wetland ecosystems are vital for maintaining global biodiversity, as they provide important stopover sites for many species of migrating wetland-associated birds. However, because weather determines their hydrologic cycles, wetlands are highly vulnerable to effects of climate change. Although changes in temperature and precipitation resulting from climate change are expected to reduce inundation of wetlands, few efforts have been made to quantify how these changes will influence the availability of stopover sites for migratory wetland birds. Additionally, few studies have evaluated how climate change will influence interannual variability or the frequency of extremes in wetland availability. For spring and fall...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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A monthly water balance model (MWBM) was driven with precipitation and temperature using a station-based dataset for current conditions (1949 to 2010) and selected statistically-downscaled general circulation models (GCMs) for current and future conditions (1950 to 2099) across the conterminous United States (CONUS) using hydrologic response units from the Geospatial Fabric for National Hydrologic Modeling (Viger and Bock, 2014). Six MWBM output variables (actual evapotranspiration (AET), potential evapotranspiration (PET), runoff (RO), streamflow (STRM), soil moisture storage (SOIL), and snow water equivalent (SWE)) and the two MWBM input variables (atmospheric temperature (TAVE) and precipitation (PPT)) were summarized...
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USFWS Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) throughout the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) have identified high nutrient runoff, a major contributor to Gulf hypoxia, and declines in wildlife populations (especially grassland and riparian birds), as conservation challenges requiring collaborative action. This project aimed to develop a spatial decision support system (DSS) to address these issues. The DSS was designed to identify MRB watersheds where application of conservation practices can (1) reduce nutrient export to the Gulf hypoxia zone and (2) enhance conservation for grassland and riparian birds, based on (3) identifying landowners willing and capable of implementing these practices. The DSS is expected...
Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2014, Bird Conservation, Birds, Birds, Birds, All tags...


map background search result map search result map Building Capacity within the CSC Network to Effectively Deliver and Communicate Science to Resource Managers and Planners Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Improving Representation of Extreme Precipitation Events in Regional Climate Models Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Developing Effective Drought Monitoring Tools for Farmers and Ranchers in the South Central U.S. Science to Assess Future Conservation Practices for the Mississippi River Basin Monthly Water Balance Model Futures Building a Decision-Support Tool for Assessing the Impacts of Climate and Land Use Change on Ecological Processes Estimating the Future Effects of Forest Disturbance on Snow Water Resources in a Changing Environment Time to Restore: Using a Community Based Approach to Identify Key Plant Species for Pollinator Restoration Future of Fire in the South Central: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate The Role of Forest Structure in Regulating Water Availability and Implications for Natural Resources and Ecosystem Function Natural and Observed flow at gauging stations from Presidio, Texas, to the outlet of the Rio Grande/Bravo from 1900 to 2011 Expanding the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) to the South Central United States Improving Predictive Drought Models with Sensitivity Analysis Estimating the Future Effects of Forest Disturbance on Snow Water Resources in a Changing Environment Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Improving Predictive Drought Models with Sensitivity Analysis The Role of Forest Structure in Regulating Water Availability and Implications for Natural Resources and Ecosystem Function Natural and Observed flow at gauging stations from Presidio, Texas, to the outlet of the Rio Grande/Bravo from 1900 to 2011 Building Capacity within the CSC Network to Effectively Deliver and Communicate Science to Resource Managers and Planners Improving Representation of Extreme Precipitation Events in Regional Climate Models Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Building a Decision-Support Tool for Assessing the Impacts of Climate and Land Use Change on Ecological Processes Future of Fire in the South Central: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Time to Restore: Using a Community Based Approach to Identify Key Plant Species for Pollinator Restoration Expanding the Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox (CART) to the South Central United States Developing Effective Drought Monitoring Tools for Farmers and Ranchers in the South Central U.S. Science to Assess Future Conservation Practices for the Mississippi River Basin Monthly Water Balance Model Futures