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Location Folder Show Tree ROOT ScienceBase Catalog Users Filters Date Range Past year (5) Past month (0) Past week (0) Past day (0) Custom range... To   Search Extensions Citation (19) Types Map Service (1) OGC WFS Layer (1) OGC WMS Layer (1) OGC WMS Service (1) Report (1) Contacts North Central CASC Amy Symstad Gregor W. Schuurman Sarah R Weiskopf Amber N. Runyon More... Categories Publication (19) Tag Types Label (2) Theme (1) Organization (2) Science Themes (2) Science Tools For Managers (2) Tag Schemes https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/NCCWSC/Keyword (1) https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/NCCWSC/Project/OrganizationName (2) https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/NCCWSC/ScienceThemes (2) https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/NCCWSC/ScienceToolsforManagers (2) View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV Browse Folder

Final Report: Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in nearly 100 parks, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to be responsive and adaptive to future climate change. As a step toward developing a process to address this need, this project worked with Dinosaur National Monument to consider climate change in its grazing management planning process. In this project, we convened researchers, managers, subject-matter experts, and climate change adaptation specialists through a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to develop and apply a small set of challenging,... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Report Final report: An Ecosystem Services Approach to Climate Adaptation Research Key Messages: 1. Ecosystem functions and the services they provide to people can support climate adaptation efforts. 2. A systems perspective that includes ecosystem services could contribute to the CASC research agenda in three interrelated ways: they can directly benefit current CASC stakeholder goals, they can provide co-benefits to CASC stakeholders, and they allow for full-benefit accounting of the impacts of choices made by natural resource managers. 3. Some existing CASC research aligns well with an ecosystem services framing and could be enhanced by understanding how the components fit into a broader multi-objective context. Notable bright spots for research in these dimensions concern coastal resilience... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Climate change scenario planning for resource stewardship at Wind Cave National Park: Climate change scenario planning summary 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 Seventy questions of importance to the conservation of the North Central grasslands of the United States in a changing climate Successful conservation of ecosystems in a changing climate requires actionable research that directly supports the rethinking and revising of management approaches to address changing risks and opportunities. As an important first step toward actionable research, we reviewed and synthesized grassland management-related documents to identify broadly shared questions that, if answered, would help to support collective conservation of the grasslands in the northern Great Plains of the United States in a changing climate. A Management Priorities Working Group reviewed 183 grassland-relevant management documents and identified 70 questions. Feedback was iteratively provided by a Climate and Ecology Working Group, an... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Biodiversity loss reduces global terrestrial carbon storage Natural ecosystems store large amounts of carbon globally, as organisms absorb carbon from the atmosphere to build large, long-lasting, or slow-decaying structures such as tree bark or root systems. An ecosystem’s carbon sequestration potential is tightly linked to its biological diversity. Yet when considering future projections, many carbon sequestration models fail to account for the role biodiversity plays in carbon storage. Here, we assess the consequences of plant biodiversity loss for carbon storage under multiple climate and land-use change scenarios. We link a macroecological model projecting changes in vascular plant richness under different scenarios with empirical data on relationships between biodiversity... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Biodiversity, Climate-change ecology, Climate-change impacts, Climate-change mitigation, Ecosystem services Final Report: Refining Guidance for Incorporating Climate Science and Scenario Planning into National Park Service Resource Stewardship Strategies One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. To help federal land managers address this need, the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) has been working with the National Park Service (NPS) to pioneer an approach for incorporating climate science and scenario planning into NPS planning processes, in particular Resource Stewardship Strategies (RSS). These strategies serve as a long-range planning tool for a national park unit to achieve its desired natural and cultural resource conditions, and are used to guide a park’s full spectrum of resource-specific management plans and day-to-day management activities.... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Co-producing simulation models to inform resource management: a case study from southwest South Dakota Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Data Visualization & Tools, North Central CASC, Science Tools for Managers Divergent, plausible, and relevant climate futures for near- and long-term resource 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 A Conceptual Framework to Integrate Biodiversity, Ecosystem Function, and Ecosystem Service Models Abstract (from BioScience): Global biodiversity and ecosystem service models typically operate independently. Ecosystem service projections may therefore be overly optimistic because they do not always account for the role of biodiversity in maintaining ecological functions. We review models used in recent global model intercomparison projects and develop a novel model integration framework to more fully account for the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function, a key gap for linking biodiversity changes to ecosystem services. We propose two integration pathways. The first uses empirical data on biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships to bridge biodiversity and ecosystem function models and could currently... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Increasing the uptake of ecological model results in policy decisions to improve biodiversity outcomes Abstract (from Environmental Modelling & Software): Models help decision-makers anticipate the consequences of policies for ecosystems and people; for instance, improving our ability to represent interactions between human activities and ecological systems is essential to identify pathways to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, use of modeling outputs in decision-making remains uncommon. We share insights from a multidisciplinary National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center working group on technical, communication, and process-related factors that facilitate or hamper uptake of model results. We emphasize that it is not simply technical model improvements, but active and iterative stakeholder... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Conservation under uncertainty: Innovations in participatory climate change scenario planning from U.S. national parks The impacts of climate change (CC) on natural and cultural resources are far-reaching and complex. A major challenge facing resource managers is not knowing the exact timing and nature of those impacts. To confront this problem, scientists, adaptation specialists, and resource managers have begun to use scenario planning (SP). This structured process identifies a small set of scenarios—descriptions of potential future conditions that encompass the range of critical uncertainties—and uses them to inform planning. We reflect on a series of five recent participatory CC SP projects at four US National Park Service units and derive guidelines for using CC SP to support natural and cultural resource conservation. Specifically,... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation From flowering to foliage: Accelerometers track tree sway to provide high-resolution insights into tree phenology Trees are bioindicators of global climate change and regional urbanization, but available monitoring tools are ineffective for fine-scale observation of many species. Using six accelerometers mounted on two urban ash trees (Fraxinus americana), we looked at high-frequency tree vibrations, or change in periodicity of tree sway as a proxy for mass changes, to infer seasonal patterns of flowering and foliage (phenophases). We compared accelerometer-estimated phenophases to those derived from digital repeat photography using Green Chromatic Coordinates (GCC) and visual observation of phenophases defined by the USA National Phenology Network (NPN). We also drew comparisons between two commercial accelerometers and assessed... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation A new approach for representing agent-environment feedbacks: coupled agent-based and state-and-transition simulation models Context Agent-based models (ABMs) and state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) have proven useful for understanding processes underlying social-ecological systems and evaluating practical questions about how systems might respond to different scenarios. ABMs can simulate a variety of agents (autonomous units, such as wildlife or people); agent characteristics, decision-making, adaptive behavior, and mobility; and agent-environment interactions. STSMs are flexible and intuitive stochastic landscape models that can track scenarios and integrate diverse data. Both can be run spatially and track metrics of management success. Objectives Due to the complementarity of these approaches, we sought to couple them through... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Scenario-Based Decision Analysis: Integrated scenario planning and structured decision making for resource management under climate change 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 PS3: The Pheno-Synthesis software suite for integration and analysis of multi-scale, multi-platform phenological data Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life-cycle stages which can be observed across spatial and temporal scales that span orders of magnitude (e.g., organisms to landscapes). The variety of scales at which phenological processes operate is reflected in the range of methods for collecting phenologically relevant data, and the programs focused on these collections. Consideration of the scale at which phenological observations are made, and the platform used for observation, is critical for the interpretation of phenological data and the application of these data to both research questions and land management objectives. However, there is currently little capacity to facilitate access, integration and... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Climate Change and the Global Redistribution of Biodiversity: Substantial Variation in Empirical Support for Expected Range Shifts Among the most widely predicted climate change-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution to track their climate niches. A series of commonly articulated hypotheses have emerged in the scientific literature suggesting species are expected to shift their distributions to higher latitudes, greater elevations, and deeper depths in response to rising temperatures associated with climate change. Yet, many species are not demonstrating range shifts consistent with these expectations. Here, we evaluate the impact of anthropogenic climate change (specifically, changes in temperature and precipitation) on species’ ranges, and assess whether expected range... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Depth, Distribution Shift, Elevation, Global Change, Latitude, All tags... Species Redistribution, Vulnerability, Warming, Fewer tags Overcoming “analysis paralysis” through better climate change scenario planning This "In Brief" article describes the use of scenario planning to facilitate climate change adaptation in the National Park Service. It summarizes best practices and innovations for using climate change scenario planning, with an emphasis on management outcomes and manager perspectives. The scenario planning approach and management outcomes highlighted in this article are the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between the USGS and the National Park Service. Categories: Publication; Types: Citation Synthesis of Climate and Ecological Science to Support Grassland Management Priorities in the North Central Region Grasslands in the Great Plains are of ecological, economic, and cultural importance in the United States. In response to a need to understand how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center led a synthesis of peer-reviewed climate and ecology literature relevant to grassland management in the North Central Region (including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas). This synthesis was done to begin to address grassland managers’ information needs and identify research gaps. This open-file report summarizes the impacts of climate change and variability... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service Final Report: Model-Based Scenario Planning to Inform Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains We worked with managers in two focal areas to plan for the uncertain future by integrating quantitative climate change scenarios and simulation modeling into scenario planning exercises. In our central North Dakota focal area, centered on Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, managers are concerned about how changes in flood severity and growing conditions for native and invasive plants may affect archaeological resources and cultural landscapes associated with the Knife and Missouri Rivers. Climate projections and hydrological modeling based on those projections indicate plausible changes in spring and summer soil moisture ranging from a 7 percent decrease to a 13 percent increase and maximum winter... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Data Visualization & Tools, North Central CASC, North Central CASC, Northern Great Plains, Report: Report, All tags... Scenario Planning, Science Tools for Managers, simulation modeling, Fewer tags