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This report explains scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool in general, then describes how it was applied to Wind Cave National Park as the second part of a pilot project to dovetail climate change scenario planning with National Park Service (NPS) Resource Stewardship Strategy development. In the orientation phase, Park and regional NPS staff, other subject-matter experts, natural and cultural resource planners, and the climate change core team who led the scenario planning project identified priority resource management topics and associated climate sensitivities. Next, the climate change core team used this information to create a set of four divergent climate futures—summaries of relevant climate...
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This is a spatially-explicit state-and-transition simulation model of rangeland vegetation dynamics in southwest South Dakota. It was co-designed with resource management partners to support scenario planning for climate change adaptation. The study site encompasses part of multiple jurisdictions, including Badlands National Park, Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The model represents key vegetation types, grazing, exotic plants, fire, and the effects of climate and management on rangeland productivity and composition (i.e., distribution of ecological community phases). See Miller et al. (2017) for further details. The model was built using the ST-Sim software platform (www.apexrms.com/stsm)....
Categories: Data;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Badlands National Park,
Bison,
Buffalo Gap National Grassland,
Cattle,
Climate change, All tags...
Climatology,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Fire,
Grazing,
Invasive species,
Land Use Change,
Livestock,
North Central CASC,
Northern Great Plains,
Scenario planning,
Science Tools for Managers,
South Dakota,
State-and-transition simulation model,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC), Fewer tags
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Introduction (From Parks Stewardship Forum) Managers and scientists widely acknowledge climate change as one of the greatest threats to protected areas in the US and worldwide (Gross et al. 2016). The US National Park Service (NPS) began addressing climate change as early as the 1990s, and in 2010 NPS Director Jonathan Jarvis stated that “climate change is fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced” (NPS 2010). Today, parks throughout the NPS system experience impacts of human-caused climate change (e.g., Monahan and Fisichelli 2014; Gonzalez 2018) that threaten iconic park resources. Climate-related impacts include: melting glaciers (e.g., Glacier National...
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Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible future climates that could occur at a specific place and time. Divergent climate futures that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions support information needs of decision makers, including understanding the spectrum of potential resource responses to climate change, developing strategies robust to...
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