Foundational Science Area: Climate Adaptation Strategies for Wildlife and Habitats in the North Central U.S.

Principal Investigator

Andrew Hansen

Start Date

2017-10-01

End Date

2019-09-30

Release Date

2017

In the first phase of the Impacts and Vulnerability project, we have made substantial progress in assessing climate and land use change impacts across the NC CSC domain. These include: quantifying the rates of land use change in and around the protected area systems, determining the extent of fragmentation in major ecosystems, assessing evaporative demands, and predicting forest ecosystem responses to climate change. We found that rates of climate and land use change varied across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, as did the responses of ecosystems to these changes. We also identified the major locations highly impacted by these changes that call for crafting locally relevant adaptation strategies to cope with these changes. Now, the second phase of the project (FY’17) aims at generating coproduction of knowledge targeting a wide range of stakeholders to support decision makers for the management and conservation of affected areas. During the FY’17 phase of the project, we will focus on working with various user groups to evaluate potential land use and climate impacts and adaptation strategies for the most affected areas and ecosystem types identified by our previous work. Specifically, we will focus on forest and shrubland vegetation and habitat of a selected wildlife species (wolverine) in the Rocky Mountains and Washington Cascade regions. We will design resource briefs on land use and climate change assessments of selected areas and ecosystem types to provide information to coordinated management. In addition to resource briefs, our approach will be to convene a series of webinars and workshops with federal, private, and NGO stakeholders (including the whitebark pine team) to draw on all of the science results (e.g., from species distribution models, state and transition models, and mechanistic models) to identify and evaluate vegetation climate adaptation strategies that are robust under climate uncertainty. This project team is part of the North Central Climate Science Center’s Foundational Science Area Team, which supports foundational research and advice, guidance, and technical assistance to other NC CSC projects as they address climate science challenges that are important for land managers and ecologists in the region.

ScienceBase WMS

• National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers
• North Central CASC