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Mike Gough

Land managers in the Great Basin are working to maintain or restore sagebrush ecosystems as climate change exacerbates existing threats. Web applications delivering climate change and climate impacts information have the potential to assist their efforts. Although many web applications containing climate information currently exist, few have been co-produced with land managers or have incorporated information specifically focused on land managers’ needs. Through surveys and interviews, we gathered detailed feedback from federal, state, and tribal sagebrush land managers in the Great Basin on climate information web applications targeting land management. We found that a) managers are searching for weather and climate...
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Northwest Basin and Range Synthesis Project
FY2015The Northwestern Great Basin ecoregion is one of the most intact ecosystems in the west. It is also a biological hotspot for migratory birds, greater sage-grouse and a stronghold for pronghorn antelope. However, altered fire regimes, invasive species, water scarcity, development, and climate change threaten the integrity of this landscape. Several efforts are ongoing for individual species, specific threats or sub-geographies, and over 60 existing plans and assessments have been identified for the region. This project will pull the pieces together to create a holistic view of shared priorities on the landscape.
Categories: Data, Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: Alford Desert, Alford Desert, Alford Desert, Alford Desert, Applications and Tools, All tags...
Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) has been developing web applications to centralize and serve credible and usable information that allows natural resource managers, as well as the general public, to better understand the challenges posed by on-going environmental change. In particular CBI has designed a series of climate consoles that provide natural resource managers the most recent 5th Climate Model Intercomparison Program (CMIP5) climate projections, landscape intactness, and soil sensitivity for a series of reporting units over the western United States. The publically available web sites were refined based on feedback from a variety of users. In this paper, we describe each of the tools developed as open-source...
Tool: Nature's Stage Climate Mapper
The Nature’s Stage Climate Mapper allows users to explore the geoclimatic stability of HUC5 watersheds within the Pacific Northwest.Geoclimatic Stability, as defined here, is a measure of a natural system’s capacity to remain stable as the climate changes over time. This is based on two factors: * Climate Departure: a measure of how different the future climate is projected to be from the historical climate. * Climate Resilience: a measure of how resilient an area is expected to be to changes in climate (based on topoclimate diversity and landscape permeability).A watershed with lower levels of climate departure and higher levels of climate resilience is more likely to sustain current levels of native biodiversity...
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Developing Usable Climate Tools for Land Managers
FY2015Researchers conducted interviews with sagebrush land managers from Oregon, Idaho and Utah to identify the most relevant variables, threats and management strategies relevant to their specific sagebrush management areas. Managers were also asked to assess a series of web-based climate tools, providing feedback about what features of the tools were most intuitive, interesting and useful, or complicated, unnecessary, and in need of revision. Results from the first phase of the project suggested several directions to improve existing climate tools.
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