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 responses and resilience to climate change in the proposed study areas, and provide new tools for assessing changes in wetlands at the landscape scale over a larger domain in future studies.
Databases and reports are available on the Columbia Basin Climate Change Scenarios website at www.hydro.washington.edu and via collaborative partnerships with the UW Climate Impacts Group and EcoAdapt.
