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This management brief summarizes the results of a project evaluating the scientific body of research on climate adaptation actions relevant to ecological drought. This adaptation science assessment evaluated strategies developed and prioritized by participants at regional adaptation workshops by synthesizing supporting evidence from the literature. The brief presents findings on the benefits and limitations of these climate adaptation options from the accompanying report, Extremes to Ex-Streams: Ecological Drought Adaptation in a Changing Climate.
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges on natural and cultural resource management and conservation practice. Resource managers and conservation planners are addressing these challenges by revising current plans and practices with increased attention on potential climate impacts to natural resources, communities, and socioeconomic values to better meet long-term goals. However, decision-making is complicated by uncertainty in terms of which adaptation actions are best suited for different implementation conditions and supported by scientific evidence (Sutherland et al. 2004; Cook et al. 2009; Eriksen et al. 2011; Bayliss et al. 2012; Cross et al. 2012). The purpose of this and other EcoAdapt adaptation...
Climate change is anticipated to increase the frequency and intensity of droughts, with major impacts to ecosystems globally. Broad-scale assessments of vegetation responses to drought are needed to anticipate, manage, and potentially mitigate climate-change effects on ecosystems. We quantified the drought sensitivity of vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA, as the percent reduction in vegetation greenness under droughts relative to baseline moisture conditions. At a regional scale, shrub-steppe ecosystems—with drier climates and lower biomass—showed greater drought sensitivity than conifer forests. However, variability in drought sensitivity was considerable within biomes and within ecosystems and was mediated...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
As the Earth’s climate changed in the ancient past, many species moved across the landscape to track adequate environmental conditions. Some species took shelter in remaining pockets of suitable climates, referred to as refugia. For example, refugia harbored species when vast glaciers covered much of the land, allowing them to survive and migrate again across the landscape as temperatures warmed and ice melted. Modern changes in climate are similarly compelling species to move, and some of those species may seek shelter from increasingly hostile conditions in refugia. Modern climate refugia will likely take many different forms. For example, larger-scale macrorefugia may be areas of relative climate stability that...
Projected intensification of drought as a result of climate change may reduce the capacity of streams to rear fish, exacerbating the challenge of recovering salmonid populations listed under the Endangered Species Act. Without management intervention, some stocks will likely go extinct as stream drying and fragmentation reduce juvenile survival to unsustainable levels. To offset drought‐related mortality, fish rescue programs have proliferated, whereby juvenile salmonids are captured and transferred to off‐site rearing facilities. However, the efficacy of this potential conservation tool remains poorly understood. We developed a life cycle model to examine the implications of fish rescue on the abundance of Coho...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Applied Wetland Science): Wetland conservation increasingly must account for climate change and legacies of previous land-use practices. Playa wetlands provide critical wildlife habitat, but may be impacted by intensifying droughts and previous hydrologic modifications. To inform playa restoration planning, we asked: (1) what are the trends in playa inundation? (2) what are the factors influencing inundation? (3) how is playa inundation affected by increasingly severe drought? (4) do certain playas provide hydrologic refugia during droughts, and (5) if so, how are refugia patterns related to historical modifications? Using remotely sensed surface-water data, we evaluated a 30-year time series (1985–2015)...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from SpringerOpen): Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana, USA) have been immense in recent years, capturing the attention of resource managers, fire scientists, and the general public. This paper synthesizes understanding of the potential effects of changing climate and fire regimes on Pacific Northwest forests, including effects on disturbance and stress interactions, forest structure and composition, and post-fire ecological processes. We frame this information in a risk assessment context, and conclude with management implications and future research needs. Large and severe fires in the Pacific Northwest are associated with warm and dry conditions, and such...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests throughout the western United States have experienced significant mortality in recent decades, which has been influenced by climate variability, especially drought. In the western portion of its range, where most precipitation arrives during winter as snowfall and summers are dry, snowdrifts that persist into the growing season provide soil moisture recharge that sustain aspen groves. Aspen groves are important locations of biodiversity within these landscapes. There is growing concern that reduced snowpack due to climate change may reduce the long-term persistence and productivity of aspen communities in these regions. In this study, we...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed the PRObability of Streamflow PERmanence (PROSPER) model, a GIS raster-based empirical model that provides streamflow permanence probabilities (probabilistic predictions) of a stream channel having year-round flow for any unregulated and minimally-impaired stream channel in the Pacific Northwest region, U.S. The model provides annual predictions for 2004–2016 at a 30-m spatial resolution based on monthly or annually updated values of climatic conditions and static physiographic variables associated with the upstream basin. Predictions correspond to any pixel on the channel network consistent with the medium resolution National Hydrography...
Abstract (from Oxford Academic): Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales, and affected taxa, they have not been characterized systematically over space and time, which is crucial for understanding their role in facilitating resilience in the context of global change. We identify four dichotomies that delineate an overarching conceptual framework of fire refugia: unburned versus lower severity, species-specific versus landscape-process characteristics, predictable versus stochastic, and ephemeral versus persistent....
Abstract (from Wiley Online Library): As evidenced by past climatic refugia, locations projected to harbor remnants of present‐day climates may serve as critical refugia for current biodiversity in the face of modern climate change. We mapped potential climatic refugia in the future across North America, defined as locations with increasingly rare climatic conditions. We identified these locations by tracking projected changes in the size and distribution of climate analogs over time. We used biologically derived thresholds to define analogs and tested the impacts of dispersal limitation with 4 distances to limit analog searches. We identified at most 12% of North America as potential climatic refugia. Refugia extent...
National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) stream permanence classifications (SPC; perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral) are widely used for data visualization and applied science, and have implications for resource policy and management. NHD SPC were assigned using a combination of topographic field surveys and interviews with local residents. However, previous studies indicate that non‐NHD, in situ streamflow observations (NNO) frequently disagree with NHD SPC. We hypothesized that differences in annual climate conditions between map creation years and the years NNO were collected contributed to disagreement between NNO and NHD SPC. We compared NHD SPC to 10,055 NNO (classified as “wet” or “dry”) collected in the Pacific...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from CSIRO): Remote sensing products provide a vital understanding of wildfire effects across a landscape, but detection and delineation of low- and mixed-severity fire remain difficult. Although data provided by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project are frequently used to assess severity in the United States, alternative indices can offer improvement in the measurement of low-severity fire effects and would be beneficial for future product development and adoption. This research note evaluated one such alternative, the Mid-Infrared Bi-Spectral Index (MIRBI), which was developed in savannah ecosystems to isolate spectral changes caused by burning and reduce noise from other factors. MIRBI,...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Altered climate and changing fire regimes are synergistically impacting forest communities globally, resulting in deviations from historical norms and creation of novel successional dynamics. These changes are particularly important when considering the stability of a keystone species such as quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.), which contributes critical ecosystem services across its broad North American range. As a relatively drought intolerant species, projected changes of altered precipitation timing, amount, and type (e.g. snow or rain) may influence aspen response to fire, especially in moisture-limited and winter precipitation-dominated portions of its range. Aspen is...
Abstract (from AGU100): In complex terrain, drifting snow contributes to ecohydrologic landscape heterogeneity and ecological refugia. In this study, we assessed the climate sensitivity of hydrological dynamics in a semiarid mountainous catchment in the snow‐to‐rain transition zone. This catchment includes a distinct snow drift‐subsidized refugium that comprises a small portion (14.5%) of the watershed but accounts for a disproportionate amount (modeled average 56%) of hydrological flux generation. We conducted climate sensitivity experiments using a physically based hydrologic model to assess responses of a suite of hydrologic metrics across the watershed. Experiments with an imposed 3.5 °C warming showed reductions...
This fact sheet was prepared by Jessica Halofsky, David Peterson and Brian Harvey, University of Washington, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Editorial assistance from Patti Loesche and Darcy Widmayer. Funding for this work provided by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. This fact sheets goes with the following synthesis paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8.
Abstract (from esa): Western U.S. wildfire area burned has increased dramatically over the last half‐century. How contemporary extent and severity of wildfires compare to the pre‐settlement patterns to which ecosystems are adapted is debated. We compared large wildfires in Pacific Northwest forests from 1984 to 2015 to modeled historic fire regimes. Despite late twentieth‐century increases in area burned, we show that Pacific Northwest forests have experienced an order of magnitude less fire over 32 yr than expected under historic fire regimes. Within fires that have burned, severity distributions are disconnected from historical references. From 1984 to 2015, 1.6 M ha burned; this is 13.3–18.9 M ha less than expected....
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Fire refugia – the unburned areas within fire perimeters – are important to the survival of many taxa through fire events and the revegetation of post-fire landscapes. Previous work has shown that species use and benefit from small-scale fire refugia (1–1000 m2), but our understanding of where and how fire refugia form is largely limited to the scale of remotely sensed data (i.e., 900 m2 Landsat pixels). To examine the causes and consequences of small fire refugia, we field-mapped all unburned patches ≥1 m2 within a contiguous 25.6 ha forest plot that burned at generally low-to-moderate severity in the 2013 Yosemite Rim Fire, California, USA. Within the Yosemite Forest Dynamics Plot...
Abstract (from Ecosphere): Conservation planning for wildlife species requires mapping and assessment of habitat suitability across broad areas, often relying on a diverse suite, or stack, of geospatial data presenting multidimensional controls on a species. Stacks of univariate, independently developed vegetation layers may not represent relationships between each variable that can be characterized by multivariate modeling techniques, leading to inaccurate inferences on the distribution of suitable habitat. In this paper, we examine the role of variable combining in mapping multiple dimensions of greater sage‐grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus, GRSG) habitat as a basis for GRSG conservation in the great basin ecoregion...
Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) has increased the extent and frequency of fire and negatively affected native plant and animal species across the Intermountain West (USA). However, the strengths of association between cheatgrass occurrence or abundance and fire, livestock grazing, and precipitation are not well understood. We used 14 years of data from 417 sites across 10,000 km(2) in the central Great Basin to assess the effects of the foregoing predictors on cheatgrass occurrence and prevalence (i.e., given occurrence, the proportion of measurements in which the species was detected). We implemented hierarchical Bayesian models and considered covariates for which > 0.90 or < 0.10 of the posterior predictive mass...