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Mark Schwartz

Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors related to the suppression of the Indigenous use of fire, aggressive fire suppression and, in some cases, changes in logging practices...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Exposure (vulnerability) index for the future time period (2061-2080) representing projected climate conditions from the Meteorological Research Institute's Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model, version 3, and the rcp85 emissions scenario. The exposure model uses LANDFIRE vegetation data and Worldclim climate data .The raster values represent exposure scores for the corresponding vegetation type. The modeled vegetation types can be spatially associated with the exposure values by overlaying them with the "landfire_veg_sw_300m.tif" raster.Exposure values represent where the location falls in climate space relative to its recent historical distribution:5 (core 5% of historical climate space); 10 (5 -...
This survey was used in a study on the use of scientific information in public natural resource management planning and decision-making. This survey was intended to help staff at the Southwest Climate Science Center (SWCSC), and others in the research community, gain a more specific understanding of the kinds of decisions made by public natural resource officials and to identify how scientific information, and in particular climate information, is obtained and applied in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) natural resource decision-making processes. Aside from questions and associated information, the survey document contains page logic describing actions taken in a web-based environment.
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Climate Change and Federal Land Management: Assessing Priorities Using a Social Network Approach
We are seeking to better understand networks among resource managers with respect to developing plans for climate change adaptation. We are pursuing this through a network analysis based on a survey of federal resource management staff and scientists in the southwestern and Midwestern U.S. Originally planned, this study was conceived to cover the Southwest and North Central Climate Science Centers, as defined by the USGS. In practice, surveys are most easily distributed within regions as defined by the federal resource agencies. Unfortunately, there is no uniform set of regions. We have tried to be comprehensive in our survey and cover at least the North Central and Southwestern Region.
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