Skip to main content
Advanced Search

Folders: ROOT > ScienceBase Catalog > National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers > Alaska CASC > FY 2019 Projects ( Show direct descendants )

10 results (72ms)   

Filters
Date Range
Extensions
Types
Contacts
Categories
Tag Types
Tag Schemes
View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV
thumbnail
Salmon that spawn and rear in Southeast Alaska watersheds are critically important to the region’s economic vitality and cultural identity. An estimated 90% of rural households in Southeast Alaska use salmon. Environmental changes that compromise the ability of these streams to support salmon could have dramatic consequences for the region. In particular, there is concern that climate change could undermine the capacity of the region’s streams to support productive fisheries. As a result, regional stakeholders are interested in identifying some of the potential impacts of climate change on watersheds that support abundant salmon. These stakeholders include federal and state agencies (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,...
Abstract (from Global Change Biology): Mountain watersheds often contain a mosaic of glacier-, snow-, and rain-fed streams that have distinct hydrologic, temperature, and biogeochemical regimes. However, as glaciers diminish and precipitation shifts from snow to rain, the physical and chemical characteristics that make glacial or snowmelt streams distinct from rain-fed streams will fade. Among the unforeseen consequences of this hydrologic homogenization could be the loss of unique food webs that sustain aquatic consumers. To explore the impacts of a melting cryosphere on stream food webs, we parameterized an aquatic food web model with empirical physicochemical data from glacier-, snow-, and rain-fed streams in...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The melting cryosphere adds heterogeneity to the abiotic and biotic characteristics of many high latitude and montane rivers. However, climate change threatens the cryosphere's persistence in many regions. While existing research has explored the impacts of cryospheric loss on the diversity and structure of freshwater communities, implications for functional traits of communities, such as production of aquatic invertebrates, remain unresolved. Here, we quantified aquatic invertebrate community structure and secondary production in southeast Alaska (USA) streams that represent a meltwater to non-meltwater gradient, including streams fed primarily by: (1) glacier-melt, (2) snowmelt, (3) rainfall, and (4) a combination...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Limnology and Oceanography): Meltwater contributions to watersheds are shrinking as glaciers disappear, altering the flow, temperature, and biogeochemistry of freshwaters. A potential consequence of this landscape change is that streamflow patterns within glacierized watersheds will become more homogenous, potentially altering the capacity of watersheds to support Pacific salmon. To assess heterogeneity in stream habitat quality for juvenile salmon in a watershed in the Alaska Coast Mountains, we collected organic matter and invertebrate drift and measured streamwater physical and biogeochemical properties over the main runoff season in two adjacent tributaries, one fed mainly by rain and the other...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Streamflow controls many freshwater and marine processes, including salinity profiles, sediment composition, fluxes of nutrients, and the timing of animal migrations. Watersheds that border the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) comprise over 400,000 km2 of largely pristine freshwater habitats and provide ecosystem services such as reliable fisheries for local and global food production. Yet no comprehensive watershed‐scale description of current temporal and spatial patterns of streamflow exists within the coastal GOA. This is an immediate need because the spatial distribution of future streamflow patterns may shift dramatically due to warming air temperature, increased rainfall, diminishing snowpack, and rapid glacial recession....
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
thumbnail
Drought events have cost the U.S. nearly $245 billion since 1980, with costs ranging from $2 to $44 billion in any given year. However, these socio-economic losses are not the only impacts of drought. Ecosystems, fish, wildlife, and plants also suffer, and these types of drought impacts are becoming more commonplace. Further, ecosystems that recover from drought are now doing so under different climate conditions than they have experienced in the past few centuries. As temperature and precipitation patterns change, “transformational drought”, or drought events that can permanently and irreversibly alter ecosystems – such as forests converting to grasslands – are a growing threat. This type of drought has cascading...
thumbnail
This .zip file contains four products that will allow users to recreate the analyses and spatial data figures used in Sergeant et al. 2020, A classification of streamflow patterns across the coastal Gulf of Alaska: 1) Autoclass input and output files (provided as folders with multiple simple text files), 2) Classification data (.csv file) for individual watersheds, including Fundamental Daily Streamflow Statistics, landcover variables, and class membership, 3) Esri map package (.mpk file) that will allow users to recreate Figures 3 and 5 using ArcGIS and extract basic watershed-scale data such as watershed ID, drainage area, primary class assignment, and primary class membership probability (for users interested...


    map background search result map search result map State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on River Food Webs and Salmon Productivity in Southeast Alaska All available data for Sergeant et al. 2020, A classification of streamflow patterns across the coastal Gulf of Alaska The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on River Food Webs and Salmon Productivity in Southeast Alaska All available data for Sergeant et al. 2020, A classification of streamflow patterns across the coastal Gulf of Alaska State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country