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Western Washington Univ.

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Wetlands are globally important ecosystems that provide critical services for natural communities and human society, such as water storage and filtration, wildlife habitat, agriculture, recreation, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration. They are also considered to be among the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change, which will exacerbate the already threatened nature of wetlands due to changes in land-use. In montane regions, wetlands are expected to be particularly susceptible to climate-induced changes, but tools to assess the impacts of climate change are severely limited relative to other ecosystem types. To address the need for quantitative assessment tools we developed projections of climate-induced...
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Modeling Climate Impacts on the Hydrology of Pacific Northwest Montane Wetland Ecosystems
This project developed hydrologic projections for diverse wetland habitats (e.g. forest wetlands, wet meadows, small ponds, and riparian wetlands) in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) for the 2020s, 2040s, and 2080s, which can be used to support ecological and landscape-based vulnerability assessments and climate change adaptation planning. The project leveraged existing downscaled climate model scenarios and associated hydrologic datasets developed under separate funding and extended them to examine changes in aquatic habitat.Products developed in this research include new hydroclimatic datasets for assessing changes in the hydroperiod of PNW wetlands. These products are useful to land managers in forecasting ecosystem...
Categories: Data, Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2011, Academics & scientific researchers, Conservation NGOs, Conservation Planning, Conservation Planning, All tags...
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Wetlands in the remote mountains of the western US have undergone two massive ecological “experiments” spanning the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1800s and expanding after World War II, fish and wildlife managers intentionally introduced millions of predatory trout (primarily Oncorhynchus spp) into fishless mountain ponds and lakes across the western states. These new top predators, which now occupy 95% of large mountain lakes, have limited the habitat distributions of native frogs, salamanders, and wetland invertebrates to smaller, more ephemeral ponds where trout do not survive. Now a second “experiment” – anthropogenic climate change – threatens to eliminate many of these ephemeral habitats and shorten...
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Wetlands in the remote mountains of the western US have undergone two massive ecological “experiments” spanning the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1800s and expanding after World War II, fish and wildlife managers intentionally introduced millions of predatory trout (primarily Oncorhynchus spp) into fishless mountain ponds and lakes across the western states. These new top predators, which now occupy 95% of large mountain lakes, have limited the habitat distributions of native frogs, salamanders, and wetland invertebrates to smaller, more ephemeral ponds where trout do not survive. Now a second “experiment” – anthropogenic climate change – threatens to eliminate many of these ephemeral habitats and shorten...
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