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The goal of this project was to inform implementation of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC) Whitebark Pine (WBP) subcommittee’s “WBP Strategy” based on climate science and ecological forecasting. Project objectives were to: 1. Forecast ecosystem processes and WBP habitat suitability across the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) under alternative IPCC future scenarios; 2. Improve understanding of possible response to future climate by analyzing WBP/climate relationships in past millennia; 3. Develop WBP management alternatives; 4. Evaluate the alternatives under IPCC future scenarios in terms of WBP goals, ecosystem services, and costs of implementation; and 5. Draw recommendations for implementation...
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Natural resource managers are confronted with the pressing challenge to develop conservation plans that address complex ecological and societal needs against the backdrop of a rapidly changing climate. Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) provide valuable information that helps guide management and conservation actions in this regard. An essential component to CCVAs is understanding adaptive capacity, or the ability of a species to cope with or adjust to climate change. However, adaptive capacity is the least understood and evaluated component of CCVAs. This is largely due to a fundamental need for guidance on how to assess adaptive capacity and incorporate this information into conservation planning...
Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible future climates that could occur at a specific place and time. Divergent climate futures that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions support information needs of decision makers, including understanding the spectrum of potential resource responses to climate change, developing strategies robust to...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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
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Ecological drought impacts ecosystems across the U.S. that support a wide array of economic activity and ecosystem services. Managing drought-vulnerable natural resources is a growing challenge for federal, state and Tribal land managers. Plant communities and animal populations are strongly linked to patterns of drought and soil moisture availability. As a result, ecosystems may be heavily altered by future changes in precipitation and soil moisture that are driven by climate change. Although this vulnerability is well recognized, developing accurate information about the potential consequences of climate change for ecological drought is difficult because the soil moisture conditions that plants experience are...
Abstract (from Conservation Biology): Adaptive capacity (AC)—the ability of a species to cope with or accommodate climate change—is a critical determinant of species vulnerability. Using information on species’ AC in conservation planning is key to ensuring successful outcomes. We identified connections between a list of species’ attributes (e.g., traits, population metrics, and behaviors) that were recently proposed for assessing species’ AC and management actions that may enhance AC for species at risk of extinction. Management actions were identified based on evidence from the literature, a review of actions used in other climate adaptation guidance, and our collective experience in diverse fields of global-change...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment): Assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change serves as the basis for climate-adaptation planning and climate-smart conservation, and typically involves an evaluation of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (AC). AC is a species’ ability to cope with or adjust to changing climatic conditions, and is the least understood and most inconsistently applied of these three factors. We propose an attribute-based framework for evaluating the AC of species, identifying two general classes of adaptive responses: “persist in place” and “shift in space”. Persist-in-place attributes enable species to survive in situ, whereas the shift-in-space response...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Conservation Science and Practice): Resource managers have rarely accounted for evolutionary dynamics in the design or implementation of climate change adaptation strategies. We brought the research and management communities together to identify challenges and opportunities for applying evidence from evolutionary science to support on-the-ground actions intended to enhance species' evolutionary potential. We amalgamated input from natural-resource practitioners and interdisciplinary scientists to identify information needs, current knowledge that can fill those needs, and future avenues for research. Three focal areas that can guide engagement include: (1) recognizing when to act, (2) understanding...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Evolutionary Applications): There is an imperative for conservation practitioners to help biodiversity adapt to accelerating environmental change. Evolutionary biologists are well-positioned to inform the development of evidence-based management strategies that support the adaptive capacity of species and ecosystems. Conservation practitioners increasingly accept that management practices must accommodate rapid environmental change, but harbor concerns about how to apply recommended changes to their management contexts. Given the interest from both conservation practitioners and evolutionary biologists in adjusting management practices, we believe there is opportunity to accelerate the required changes...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Global climate models are a key source of climate information and produce large amounts of spatially explicit data for various physical parameters. However, these projections have substantial uncertainties associated with them, and the datasets themselves can be difficult to work with. The project team created the first version (cst 0.1.0) of the Climate Futures Toolbox, an open source workflow in R that allows users to access downscaled climate projections data, clip data by spatial boundaries (shapefile), save the output, and generate summary tables and plots. A detailed R vignette guides users to easily generate derived variables in order to answer specific questions about their region of interest (e.g. how will...
A robust method for characterizing the biophysical environment of terrestrial vegetation uses the relationship between Actual Evapotranspiration (AET) and Climatic Water Deficit (CWD). These variables are usually estimated from a water balance model rather than measured directly and are often more representative of ecologically-significant changes than temperature or precipitation. We evaluate trends and spatial patterns in AET and CWD in the Continental United States (CONUS) during 1980–2019 using a gridded water balance model. The western US had linear regression slopes indicating increasing CWD and decreasing AET (drying), while the eastern US had generally opposite trends. When limits to plant performance characterized...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation


    map background search result map search result map Science and Forecasting to Inform Implementation of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee’s Whitebark Pine Management Strategy Open-Source and Open-Workflow Climate Futures Toolbox for Adaptation Planning Evaluating Species’ Adaptive Capacity in a Changing Climate: Applications to Natural-Resource Management in the Northwestern U.S. Developing High-Resolution Soil Moisture Projections for the Contiguous U.S. Evaluating Species’ Adaptive Capacity in a Changing Climate: Applications to Natural-Resource Management in the Northwestern U.S. Science and Forecasting to Inform Implementation of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee’s Whitebark Pine Management Strategy Open-Source and Open-Workflow Climate Futures Toolbox for Adaptation Planning Developing High-Resolution Soil Moisture Projections for the Contiguous U.S.