Final Report: Understanding Extreme Climate Events in the North Central U.S.

This research element supports vulnerability assessment for climate adaptation (Glick et al. 2011) by focusing on the provision of best available climate information for the region in order to inform analysis of ecosystem exposure to change. Climate in the North Central United States (NCUS) is driven by a combination that includes large-scale patterns in atmospheric circulation, the region’s complex topography extending from the High Rockies to the Great Plains, and geographic variations in water and surface-energy balance. Hydroclimatic variability within the NCUS determines the sustainability of ecosystems in the region as well as the ecosystem goods and services they provide. We propose, therefore, to use...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Drought, Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather, Great Plains, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, High Rockies, All tags... North Central CASC, paleoenvironmental, tallgrass prairie, white bark pine, Fewer tags

Complex Response of White Pines to Past Environmental Variability Increases Understanding of Future Vulnerability

Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124439): Ecological niche models predict plant responses to climate change by circumscribing species distributions within a multivariate environmental framework. Most projections based on modern bioclimatic correlations imply that high-elevation species are likely to be extirpated from their current ranges as a result of rising growing-season temperatures in the coming decades. Paleoecological data spanning the last 15,000 years from the Greater Yellowstone region describe the response of vegetation to past climate variability and suggest that white pines, a taxon of special concern in the region, have been surprisingly resilient to...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Forests, North Central CASC

Final Report: Science and Forecasting to Inform Implementation of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee’s Whitebark Pine Management Strategy

Managing plant and wildlife species under climate change offers a substantial challenge. Federal agencies have adapted a framework for considering climate change when implementing management actions. This project was designed to demonstrate how elements of that framework, climate science, ecological forecasting, and natural resource management, can be linked to best maintain natural resources under climate change. The project focused on the whitebark pine (WBP) tree. This species occupies high mountain forests and uniquely provides foods and habitats for other species. WBP populations have undergone massive die-offs over the past decade due to pest outbreaks associated with climate warming. In the Greater Yellowstone...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Climate Change, Data Visualization & Tools, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, North Central CASC, Plants, All tags... Science Tools For Managers, WBP, Wildlife and Plants, whitebark pine, Fewer tags

Some Pitfalls in Statistical Downscaling of Future Climate

Abstract: Statistical downscaling (SD) is commonly used to provide information for the assessment of climate change impacts. Using as input the output from large-scale dynamical climate models and observation-based data products, SD aims to provide a finer grain of detail and to mitigate systematic biases. It is generally recognized as providing added value. However, one of the key assumptions of SD is that the relationships used to train the method during a historical period are unchanged in the future, in the face of climate change. The validity of this assumption is typically quite difficult to assess in the normal course of analysis, as observations of future climate are lacking. We approach this problem using...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: South Central CASC