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USGS researchers from the North Central CASC and the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center recently collaborated with the National Park Service Climate Change Response Program to develop a new product that communicates the results from a collaborative effort—involving resource managers, subject-matter experts, and a larger climate change adaptation team—to identify potential climate impacts and management responses in Badlands National Park. The researchers used scenario planning and ecological simulation modeling to anticipate management challenges and identify options for Badlands National Park and adjacent federal and tribal lands in the coming decades (through 2050). The ecological simulation models help...
Maintaining the native prairie lands of the Northern Great Plains (NGP), which provide an important habitat for declining grassland species, requires anticipating the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and climate change on the region’s vegetation. Specifically, climate change threatens NGP grasslands by increasing the potential encroachment of native woody species into areas where they were previously only present in minor numbers. This project used a dynamic vegetation model to simulate vegetation type (grassland, shrubland, woodland, and forest) for the NGP for a range of projected future climates and relevant management scenarios. Comparing results of these simulations illustrates...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2012,
Biology,
CASC,
Climate change,
Completed,
The Great Plains Grassland Summit: Challenges and Opportunities from North to South was held April 10-11, 2018 in Denver, Colorado to provide syntheses of information about key grassland topics of interest in the Great Plains; networking and learning channels for managers, researchers, and stakeholders; and working sessions for sharing ideas about challenges and future research and management opportunities. The summit was convened to better understand stressors and resource demands throughout the Great Plains and how to manage them, and to discuss methods for improved collaboration among natural resource managers, scientists, and stakeholders. Over 200 stakeholders, who collectively were affiliated with all of the...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
This report explains scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool in general, then describes how it was applied to Wind Cave National Park as the second part of a pilot project to dovetail climate change scenario planning with National Park Service (NPS) Resource Stewardship Strategy development. In the orientation phase, Park and regional NPS staff, other subject-matter experts, natural and cultural resource planners, and the climate change core team who led the scenario planning project identified priority resource management topics and associated climate sensitivities. Next, the climate change core team used this information to create a set of four divergent climate futures—summaries of relevant climate...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
This spatial data set provides information pertaining to the known land use and disturbance history for lands within the March 2018 administrative boundary of (Park, state). Land use and disturbance history presented here are not a comprehensive record of all potential land uses and disturbances but rather a record of known and documented land uses and disturbances based on the best available information. Additional land use and disturbance information may exist but due to time and budget constraints may not have been discovered during the research and development of this data set. The information in this data set was gathered through a variety of sources including but not limited to communication with National...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Data Visualization & Tools,
North Central CASC,
Science Tools for Managers
Human-driven climate change presents natural resource managers with great uncertainties. Planning and executing effective management in the face of these uncertainties requires approaches nimble enough to address a broad range of interacting factors yet scientifically rigorous enough to support decisions and actions when faced with public scrutiny. Complex interactions among management practices and climate further stymie managers trying to plan for the future. Wind Cave National Park epitomizes this complexity hydrologically with its karst geology, sinking streams, and cave lakes, and ecologically with its prairie-forest ecotonal vegetation, large ungulate herds, and prescribed and wild fires. This project partnered...
Categories: Project
This data set contains output from the dynamic vegetation model MC1, as modified to simulate future woody encroachment in the northern Great Plains, for 23 monthly variables, 63 yearly variables, and 31 multi-year variables. Variables include simulated plant (by growth form) and soil carbon stocks, net primary production, vegetation type, potential and actual evapotranspiration, stream flow, and fuel mass and moisture. Model output is provided for the EQ, Spinup, Historical, and Future stages of MC1 runs; future stages were run for four climate projections crossed with 10 or 11 fire X grazing X CO2 concentration scenarios for the western and eastern portions of the study area, respectively.
Prescribed burning – planned, controlled fires conducted under weather and fuel conditions designed for safety and effectiveness – is a common practice used to maintain and restore native prairies in the Northern Great Plains. However, climate change will affect the number of days in a year, and when, suitable conditions for prescribed fires occur. For instance, warmer temperatures may shift these “good prescribed-fire days” earlier in the spring and later in the fall, but uncertainty about future climate makes it hard to predict how large shifts will be and if the number of good fire days each year will generally increase or decrease. Further, it’s hard to know whether prescribed fires will continue to achieve...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2023,
CASC,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Fire,
Maintaining the native prairie lands of the Northern Great Plains (NGP), which provide an important habitat for declining grassland species, requires anticipating the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and climate change on the region’s vegetation. Specifically, climate change threatens NGP grasslands by increasing the potential encroachment of native woody species into areas where they were previously only present in minor numbers. This project uses a dynamic vegetation model to simulate vegetation type (grassland, shrubland, woodland, and forest) for the NGP for a range of projected future climates and relevant management scenarios. Comparing results of these simulations will...
Categories: Project
Fire played an important role in shaping ponderosa pine forests of South Dakota’s Black Hills. Consequently, prescribed fire is an important management tool in restoring and maintaining the structure of these forests after nearly a century of fire suppression. Invasive plant species like Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) and common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) are sometimes associated with post-fire landscapes, however, so this project sought to determine strategies to reduce the chances of post-fire invasive species outbreaks. Partnering with the National Park Service’s Northern Great Plains Fire Management Office, this project tracked target invasive plants immediately before to two years after prescribed fires...
Categories: Project
This spatial data set provides information pertaining to the known land use and disturbance history for lands within the March 2018 administrative boundary of (Park, state). Land use and disturbance history presented here are not a comprehensive record of all potential land uses and disturbances but rather a record of known and documented land uses and disturbances based on the best available information. Additional land use and disturbance information may exist but due to time and budget constraints may not have been discovered during the research and development of this data set. The information in this data set was gathered through a variety of sources including but not limited to communication with National...
This spatial data set provides information pertaining to the known land use and disturbance history for lands within the March 2018 administrative boundary of (Park, state). Land use and disturbance history presented here are not a comprehensive record of all potential land uses and disturbances but rather a record of known and documented land uses and disturbances based on the best available information. Additional land use and disturbance information may exist but due to time and budget constraints may not have been discovered during the research and development of this data set. The information in this data set was gathered through a variety of sources including but not limited to communication with National...
Plant cover data were collected in experimental plots at two sites, one at Badlands National Park, South Dakota, and one at Scotts Bluff National Monument, Nebraska. At each site, 40 50 x 50 m plots were assigned randomly to one of the following treatments: control (no action), burn-only (prescribed fire in fall 2016), burn+herbicide (prescribed fire followed by imazapic application in fall 2016), and burn+seed (prescribed fire followed by drilling native grass seed in fall 2016). Pre-treatment data were collected in 2015, and post-treatment data were collected in 2017 and 2018. The dataset includes four tables: (1) plant cover and species richness metrics analyzed in the larger work; (2) plant canopy cover data...
Categories: Data;
Tags: Badlands National Park,
Botany,
Ecology,
Nebraska,
Scotts Bluff National Monument,
Two exotic annual brome grasses ( Bromus tectorum and B. japonicus) have been a part of the northern Great Plains (NGP) landscape for more than a century, but their invasion in this region has accelerated since 1950. Despite their abundance and negative impact on native grasslands, management efforts to control annual bromes in NGP National Park Service units have been minimal. Spring and fall prescribed fires are used in NGP parks to manage fuel loads, control other non-native species, and maintain a vital ecosystem process, but serious concerns about their use in areas with annual brome grasses have arisen as new data have revealed the degree of invasion by these species in some NGP parks. NGP managers and...
Categories: Project
Studies from around the world have shown shifts in plant community composition, reduced plant diversity and increased abundance of invasive species in response to nitrogen addition. These results may indicate that increasing atmospheric nitrogen deposition caused by fossil fuel combustion and agricultural activities will adversely affect northern Great Plains ecosystems. However, nitrogen addition studies that have been completed in the northern Great Plains used nitrogen addition levels far above that expected from atmospheric deposition. This project partnered with Colorado State University to experimentally investigate the effects of realistic nitrogen deposition on a wide variety of plant and soil parameters...
Categories: Project
This spatial data set provides information pertaining to the known land use and disturbance history for lands within the March 2018 administrative boundary of the North Unit of Badlands National Park, South Dakota. Land use and disturbance history presented here are not a comprehensive record of all potential land uses and disturbances but rather a record of known and documented land uses and disturbances based on the best available information. Additional land use and disturbance information may exist but due to time and budget constraints may not have been discovered during the research and development of this data set. The information in this data set was gathered through a variety of sources including but not...
Managing resources under climate change is a high-stakes and daunting task, especially because climate change and associated complex biophysical responses engender sustained directional changes as well as abrupt transformations. This environmental non-stationarity challenges assumptions and expectations among scientists, managers, rights holders, and stakeholders. These challenges are anything but straightforward – a high degree of uncertainty impedes our ability to predict the environmental trajectory with confidence, and affected resources often span multiple governance jurisdictions or are subject to competing management objectives. Fortunately, tools exist to help grapple with such challenges. Two commonly used...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Climate change is expressed in both regional climatic shifts (e.g., temperature and precipitation changes) and local resource impacts. Resource management in a changing climate is challenging because future climate change and resource responses cannot be precisely predicted. Scenario planning is a tool to assess the range of plausible future conditions. However, selecting, acquiring, synthesizing, and scaling climate information for scenario planning requires significant time and skills. This project has three goals: 1) synthesize climate data into 3-5 distinctly different but plausible climate summaries for the northern Great Plains region; 2) craft summaries of these climate futures that are relevant to local...
Categories: Project
In this project researchers are assessing the links between climate, groundwater storage, spring flow, and ecosystem response in two contrasting major U.S. karst systems: the Edwards and Madison aquifers. Karst aquifers are uniquely suited for investigating effects of climate variability at timescales of human interest because they are highly dynamic; further, many provide habitat for rare and endangered species. The principal objective of this project is to determine how interrelations between karst hydrology and ecosystems will be affected by climate change. Current relations between recharge (impulse) and storage and spring flow (response) are quantified through signal-processing models that use existing...
Categories: Project
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