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Tropical forests contain > 50% of the world’s known species (Heywood 1995), 55% of global forest biomass (Pan et al. 2011), and exchange more carbon (C), water and energy with the atmosphere than any other ecosystem type (e.g., Saugier et al. 2001). Despite their importance, there is more uncertainty associated with predictions of how tropical forests will respond to warming than for any other biome (Randerson et al. 2009). This uncertainty is of global concern due to the large quantity of C cycled by these forests and the high potential for biodiversity loss. Given the importance of tropical forests, decision makers and land managers around the globe need increased predictive capacity regarding how tropical forests...
Drought is a complex challenge experienced in specific locations through diverse impacts, including ecological impacts. Different professionals involved in drought preparedness and response approach the problem from different points of view, which means they may or may not recognize ecological impacts. This study examines the extent to which interviewees perceive ecological drought in the Upper Missouri Headwaters basin in southwestern Montana. Through semistructured interviews, this research investigates individuals’ perceptions of drought by analyzing how they define drought, how they describe their roles related to drought, and the extent to which they emphasize ecological impacts of drought. Results suggest...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Changing climate conditions such as increasing droughts, floods, and wildfires, hotter temperatures, declining snowpacks, and changes in the timing of seasonal events are already having an impact on wildlife and their habitats. In order to make forward-looking management decisions that consider ongoing and future projected changes in climate, managers require access to climate information that can be easily integrated into the planning process. Co-production, a process whereby scientists work closely with managers to identify and fill knowledge gaps, is an effective means of ensuring that science results will be directly useful to managers. Through a multi-phase project, researchers are implementing co-production...
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Grasslands in the northern Great Plains are important ecosystems that support local economies, tribal communities, livestock grazing, diverse plant and animal communities, and large-scale migrations of big game ungulates, grassland birds, and waterfowl. Climate change and variability impact how people and animals live on and interact with grasslands, and can bring more frequent droughts, fires, or new plant species that make managing these landscapes challenging. Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century first requires a synthesis of what is known across all of these scales and a gap analysis to identify key areas of focus for future...
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~300 word summary: Example: The North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) is hosted by the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU Boulder) with consortium partners University of Montana (UM), South Dakota State University (SDSU), Conservation Science Partners (CSP), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance (GPTWA). During the period of 2018 - 2023, the NC CASC consortium will strive to i) deliver the best climate science for resource managers derived through co-production; ii) capitalize on the wealth of big, diverse data to inform resource management decisions at an appropriate scale in the region; and iii) leverage work within and across CASCs through open science...
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Climate change is already affecting ecosystems, and will likely trigger significant and permanent changes in both ecological and human communities. Such transformations are already occurring in the Arctic region of Alaska, where temperatures are warming at twice the global average and causing some ecosystems to transition to new states. Arctic warming has led to coastal erosion that has forced human communities to relocate and a loss of sea ice that has forced marine mammals, such as polar bears and walrus, to adapt to a more terrestrial mode of living. Meanwhile, in the Great Plains of the U.S., past interactions between land and water use during the Dust Bowl and recent high rates of depletion of the Ogallala...
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As climate change progresses, profound environmental changes are becoming a widespread concern. A new management paradigm is developing to address this concern with a framework that encourages strategic decisions to resist, accept, or direct ecological trajectories. Effective use of the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework requires the scientific community to describe the range of plausible ecological conditions managers might face, while recognizing limits to our ability to predict precisely where or how specific climatic changes may unfold or how complex environmental systems will respond - the climatic future does not fully determine the ecological one. Recent advances have improved development and delivery...
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In many places around the world, spring events, like warming temperatures, are coming earlier and fall events are coming later than they have in the past. These changes have implications for the phenology, or the timing of natural life events (e.g. the timing of plant flowering in Spring or leaves falling in Autumn), of many plant species. However, not all species and regions are changing at the same rate, which can lead to mismatches (e.g. between the emergence of plants and pollinators in early spring). Many interactions in nature depend on timing and, as such, phenology affects nearly all aspects of the environment, including the abundance, distribution, and diversity of organisms, ecosystem services, food webs,...
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Pinyon pine woodlands are among the most widespread and iconic vegetation types in the western United States and support recreation, resource extraction, grazing, and cultural enrichment. However, severe drought conditions have recently caused dramatic mortality of pinyon pines, creating concern about the long-term impact of increasing aridity on the viability of pinyon woodlands. Ecological transformations, or regime shifts, are rapid reorganizations of an ecosystem’s species composition, governing processes, and functions. The goal of this project is to investigate ecological transformation across the Western U.S, characterize the environmental drivers of these changes in vegetation, and apply those insights...
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The goal of this project was to identify climate-related scientific information needs in the North Central region that will support the management of key species and help avoid species declines. Researchers worked closely with state fish and wildlife agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, tribes, and other relevant natural resource management and conservation agencies to identify priority information needs and to design and implement studies that will address these needs. Researchers identified stakeholders, including those engaged by the North Central Climate Science Center USGS Liaisons project. Researchers worked with stakeholders to identify priority conservation targets. Selected targets were those...
Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing unprecedented and lasting change, a new management paradigm is forming, supported by a decision-oriented framework that presents three distinct management choices: resist, accept, or direct the ecological trajectory. To make these choices strategically, managers seek to understand the nature of the transformation that could occur if change is accepted while identifying opportunities to intervene to resist or direct change. In this article, we seek to inspire a research agenda...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Pinyon–juniper (PJ) woodlands are an important component of dryland ecosystems across the US West and are potentially susceptible to ecological transformation. However, predicting woodland futures is complicated by species-specific strategies for persisting and reproducing under drought conditions, uncertainty in future climate, and limitations to inferring demographic rates from forest inventory data. Here, we leverage new demographic models to quantify how climate change is expected to alter population demographics in five PJ tree species in the US West and place our results in the context of a climate adaptation framework to resist, accept, or direct ecological transformation. Two of five study species, Pinus...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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As elevation increases, both temperature and moisture availability decrease. In many parts of the world, this decrease in temperature is a limiting factor for vegetation—at certain elevations, the temperature becomes too cold for plants to survive. However in the tropics, moisture availability may play a more important role than temperature in determining the altitude at which forests can grow. For example on Haleakalā, a volcano on the Hawaiian Island of Mauʻi, the forest line is not found at the same elevation everywhere, as you would expect if it were controlled by temperature. Rather, the forest line is highest in the wetter eastern-most end and lower on the drier, western end of the volcano. Research also...
The topography of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) is characterized by steep terrain and short distances to the sea. This means that freshwater runs off the islands quickly, coming into contact with seawater in coastal estuaries. The physical characteristics of estuaries change as the tides rise and fall, creating a wide range of habitats that support diverse plants and wildlife, including economically and culturally important native species such as cetí and land crabs, as well as game fishes such as snook and tarpon. These ecosystems are already heavily threatened by human activities such as urbanization, increased sedimentation, and pollution. Changing climate conditions, such as more frequent and...
The North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Conservation Science Partners, Inc. (CSP) to systematically identify information gaps that, if addressed, would support management decisions for key species, habitats, or other issues within the North Central region (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas). In particular, we were interested in the intersection between 1) high-priority species or habitats that are 2) the subject of a planned decision, and for which 3) climate information would aid decision-making for state and federal agencies. In Spring of 2018, we interviewed state fish and wildlife managers...
THE RISING RISK OF DROUGHT. Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). For example, the “Millennium Drought”...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The southwestern U.S. is a global hotspot of climate change. Models project that temperatures will continue to rise through the end of the 21st century, accompanied by significant changes to the hydrological cycle. Within the Sonoran Desert, a limited number of studies have documented climate change impacts on the phenology of native plant species. Much of this phenological work to understand climate change impacts to phenology builds on research conducted nearly three decades ago to define flowering triggers and developmental requirements for native keystone Sonoran Desert woody species. Here we expand on the drivers and explore recent phenological trends for six species using a unique 36-year observational data...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation


map background search result map search result map Measurement of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related Climate Conditions and Ecosystem Responses in Hawaiʻi Understanding Changes to the Timing of Natural Events (Phenology) for Plants in the Water-Limited Southwest Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 1 Mapping the Risk of Ecological Transformation Across Pinyon Woodlands and the U.S. West Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 2 Synthesis of Climate Impacts and Adaptation on Grassland Ecosystems in the Northern Great Plains Adaptation Strategies in the Face of Climate-Driven Ecological Transformation: Case Studies from Arctic Alaska and the U.S. Great Plains HOST AWARD TEMPLATE: North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by The University of Colorado Boulder University (2018-2023) (COPY) Crafting Ecological Scenarios to Implement the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework Measurement of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related Climate Conditions and Ecosystem Responses in Hawaiʻi Understanding Changes to the Timing of Natural Events (Phenology) for Plants in the Water-Limited Southwest Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 2 Synthesis of Climate Impacts and Adaptation on Grassland Ecosystems in the Northern Great Plains Enabling Climate-Informed Planning and Decisions about Species of Conservation Concern in the North Central Region: Phase 1 HOST AWARD TEMPLATE: North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center Consortium - Hosted by The University of Colorado Boulder University (2018-2023) (COPY) Crafting Ecological Scenarios to Implement the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework Mapping the Risk of Ecological Transformation Across Pinyon Woodlands and the U.S. West Adaptation Strategies in the Face of Climate-Driven Ecological Transformation: Case Studies from Arctic Alaska and the U.S. Great Plains