The Wildlife Conservation Society will assess the climate change vulnerability of bird species that regularly breed in substantial populations in Alaska using the NatureServe Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) tool. Initial work will focus on breeding birds in Arctic Alaska including shorebirds, waterfowl and waterbird species (loons, gulls, terns, jaegers), and land bird species (passerines, raptors, ptarmigan).
This case study project is on the Upper Pajaro River, which crosses a 9,000-acre natural floodplain in the Central Coast. A portion of the riparian corridor within the floodplain is highly degraded due to intensive agricultural land use that has diminished its wildlife value and severed habitat connectivity. If restored, the corridor would connect 2 million acres of core habitat in adjacent uplands and link exceptionally rich natural communities in three climatically diverse coastal mountain ranges. This project developed a suite of climate-smart restoration practices in the Central Coast Ecoregion and pilot those practices on the Upper Pajaro River as a case study. Project goals are to: 1) Establish native riparian...
Using Automated Identification System (AIS) point data acquired from Alaska Marine Exchange’s station-based networks in the Aleutians and Bering Strait and satellite platforms maintained by ExactEarth to produce monthly and seasonal summaries of commercial shipping intensity by ship type. AIS data evaluation and spatial characterization will be completed by a University of Alaska, Fairbanks PhD student in cooperation with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Final layers will be made available to managers and stakeholders through the Arctic E. Their expanded regional layers will be analyzed by a group of leading NGOs including: Alaska Marine Conservation Council, Audubon Alaska, Oceana and the Wildlife Conservation...
The Washington Connected Landscapes Project will provide a framework to address the interacting impacts of habitat fragmentation and climate change on ecological systems and wildlife species within the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) boundary.Managing for well-connected landscapes is a key strategy to enhance resilience and ensure the long-term viability of plant and animal populations. However, conservation planning efforts have rarely included connectivity for ecological processes such as dispersal, migration, and gene flow. Connectivity conservation is particularly important in the face of climate change, because many species will require highly permeable, well-connected landscapes not...
We propose to work with the Rocky Mountain Partnership Forum to expand upon the successful approach applied in the first two years of this project to help managers incorporate climate change science into their natural resource management decisions for a new resource of interest that will be chosen by the Rocky Mountain Partner Forum members. This project will be implemented through the Rocky Mountain Partner Forum to share information with and among partners about emerging climate science and strategies for integrating climate change into natural resource management decisions in the region. We will also support the Rocky Mountain Partner Forum Leadership Team as it seeks to formalize the Forum and set directions...
While we assessed the vulnerability of a number of different wildlife and plant species to climate change, none of those species exhibited high vulnerability to changes projected for the region and there was limited differentiation in vulnerability between the individual species. Given this shared level of vulnerability to climate change, we chose to focus our adaptation planning on grassland birds as they represent a large group with a diversity of habitat needs. These birds are obligate grassland wildlife species which have great potential to act as indicators for habitat quality since different species have distinct habitat structure needs. Participants in the adaptation planning workshop agreed that if the GP...
Despite extensive knowledge and data surrounding the status and threats to Yellowstone cutthroat trout there is currently no comprehensive framework for prioritizing conservation of populations and metapopulations (i.e., locations) and potential actions that could be taken in these locations to secure and expand populations, particularly in anticipation of climate change. Through our existing collaboration with state and federal management partners from Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Montana, we propose to integrate existing information on Yellowstone cutthroat trout status and limiting factors in a spatially-explicit conservation priority framework adapted from a financial portfolio concept aimed at maximizing...
Our 2010 statewide connectivity analysis identified broad-scale priority areas for connectivity conservation. More detailed, finer-scale analyses will give land managers the information they need to begin prioritizing and implementing conservation actions. The Columbia Plateau (Appendix A, Fig. 1) was selected for the first ecoregional-scale analysis for two reasons. First, several climate models suggest that the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion in Washington is likely to be a stronghold of shrubsteppe ecosystems under climate change. Second, despite the high level of habitat loss and fragmentation in the ecoregion, our statewide analysis identified previously undocumented patterns and opportunities for multiple-species...
FY2011Thousands of data points have been collected by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Nevada Division of Wildlife from the 1950s to the present describing the distribution of declining native redband and endangered Lahontan cutthroat trout, and the invasive, nonnative brown and brook trout. USGS analyzed this data to understand the climate-related changes to species distributions and model extinction risk. The results, submittedfor publication, will be used by the State of Oregon as it drafts conservation plans for redband trout and by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection in drafting water quality criteria to protect and monitor the states coldwater fisheries.
The Open Space Institute (OSI) disseminated knowledge and tools across the northeast U.S. and the Canadian Maritimes to advance the application of NA LCC data sets for land conservation. Guidance documents were developed to help organizations build buy-in from their constituents, learn from past applications of the data, and develop strategic planning for conservation. The documents were informed by surveys, field tested and distributed by established leaders in assisting land trusts in conservation planning. Strategic partnerships aligned to help distribute guidance include the Land Trust Alliance, Highstead Foundation, and other select organizations that serve as resource ‘hubs’ for the land conservation community....
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) will facilitate integration of regional science through local land-use decision-making to enhance stewardship of North Atlantic LCC conservation priorities. The WCS will identify North Atlantic LCC science data layers that are most relevant for state and regional conservation priorities and determine opportunities for integrating this information into state and regional planning. This information will be used to identify and prioritize communities with the greatest potential to achieve conservation outcomes in locations of high conservation value on private lands through small science-based modifications to existing land-use planning tools. WCS will demonstrate on-the-ground...
Project Goal The goal of this project is two-fold: 1) to increase the understanding of how meadow restoration impacts hydrology and 2) to inform management and investment decisions around using restoration as a tool to build resilience under climate change. Objectives in support of this goal include: - Complete data collection and analysis and publish peer-reviewed research article on the results of groundwater and surface water measurements before and after restoration in Indian Valley Meadow (Eldorado National Forest) - Double the published scientific literature on the water supply benefits of meadow restoration and produce the first empirical study - Estimate groundwater and base flow (late season groundwater...
This project is part of an ongoing effort to develop and implement a landscape level decision support system (DSS) across the boundaries of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Montana. The project will strengthen public understanding in the use of objective and scientific fish and wildlife data and predictive modeling for purposes of developing geospatially-based landscape science to inform conservation and development actions. The project will inform, educate, and garner public and user support of the DSS upon its public release, aid in the development and use of the DSS web interface based on customer input and preferences, and provide communications strategies, tools, messages, forums, and feedback for improving public...
Funding supports a multiyear initiative entitled Crown of the Continent Landscapes Analysis/Ecological Indicators Project. The work is designed to focus on issues on transboundary data integration and synthesis, habitatconnectivity analysis for grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) and other key wildlife species, and outreach programs aimed at disseminating knowledge, information products, and geospatial tools arising out of this work to the extensive network of Crown Managers Partnership (CMP) and GNLCC collaborators.FY2010Objectives:The monitoring strategy will focus on the development and acquisition of geospatial datasets from remote sensing and other GIS sources designed to track changes in habitats and human footprint...