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Heather Yocum

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Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems is crucial for successful grassland management in the 21st century. In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS NC CASC) began a project to establish a baseline of information to best serve grassland managers (that is, those who develop grassland management plans or implement those plans on the ground) at Federal, State, and Tribal agen-cies and nongovernmental organizations to help meet regional grassland management goals. This project “A Synthesis of Climate Impacts, Stakeholder Needs, and Adaptation in Northern Great Plains Grassland Ecosystems” (hereafter, the Grasslands Synthesis Project),...
Successful conservation of ecosystems in a changing climate requires actionable research that directly supports the rethinking and revising of management approaches to address changing risks and opportunities. As an important first step toward actionable research, we reviewed and synthesized grassland management-related documents to identify broadly shared questions that, if answered, would help to support collective conservation of the grasslands in the northern Great Plains of the United States in a changing climate. A Management Priorities Working Group reviewed 183 grassland-relevant management documents and identified 70 questions. Feedback was iteratively provided by a Climate and Ecology Working Group, an...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This project examines how key institutional and emotional factors shape management decisions about changing the social science of ecological resources. We use interviews and focus groups to study how the culture and policy of individual parks, and the psychological and emotional experiences of managers responding to landscape changes, influence decisions.
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Natural & cultural resource managers are facing a slew of new challenges for managing public lands stemming from climate change and human-driven stressors like invasive species, fragmentation, and new resource uses. In some cases, the very landscapes and species they are managing are changing in significant ways, transforming from one set of conditions to another. As a result, previously successful management strategies may become less effective, or in some cases ineffective. New and transforming conditions leave managers in a bind on how to respond to transforming public lands and natural resources. On the most basic level managers have three choices of how to respond: resist change, accept change, or direct change...
Grasslands in the northern Great Plains are important ecosystems that support local economies, tribal communities, livestock grazing, diverse plant and animal communities, and large-scale migrations of big game ungulates, grassland birds, and waterfowl. Climate change and variability impact how people and animals live on and interact with grasslands, and can bring more frequent droughts, fires, or new plant species that make managing these landscapes challenging. Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century first requires a synthesis of what is known across all of these scales and a gap analysis to identify key areas to focus future research.
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