The Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) is an iconic landscape with national parks, iconic species like grizzly bears and elk, and over 11,500 square miles of forest. While fires are a natural part of the GYA, climate change and land management legacies are increasing the frequency and size of severe fires. Climate change interacts with these fires to shift conifer forests to non-forested grassland and sagebrush ecosystems. These transformations impact species habitat, carbon storage, and other management goals on public lands. However, managing for “natural ecosystems” is not always possible in the face of climate change. The Resist-Accept-Direct framework (RAD) can help: under RAD, managers can resist change to maintain ecosystems, accept climate- and wildfire-driven ecological change, even if that means losing species habitat or ecosystem services, or direct ecosystem changes to maintain or gain key resources or services. For this project, researchers will work with managers in the GYA to implement RAD as a strategy to manage wildfires and subsequent ecosystem changes. With managers from each GYA agency researchers will identify 1) shared and unique management goals, 2) management options that can resist, accept, or direct wildfire-related ecosystem changes, and 3) ways to coordinate RAD implementation across agencies, since fires span management boundaries on the landscape This project will help managers identify and coordinate approaches to achieve their conservation goals in the context of climate change, ensuring the preservation of key species, ecosystems, and resources in the North Central CASC region’s public lands.
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 their goals in new conditions. This project will measure how the number and timing of good fire days has changed over the last 30 years and predict how they will change over the next 50 years under four plausible future climate scenarios. Changes to longer-term weather patterns – in the seasons leading up to and following prescribed fires – may also change the effectiveness of the fires in achieving their goals, like reducing Kentucky bluegrass, cheatgrass, and other invasive grasses. To address this issue, the project will also use data from long-term plant monitoring programs to look for patterns in how prairie responds to prescribed fire in different seasonal and annual weather conditions. Land management agencies in the Northern Great Plains like the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service use prescribed fires often, so it is important for them to understand how climate change will affect the number and timing of good prescribed-fire days and fire’s effects. To that end, the ultimate goal of this project is to create a model that will help managers develop effective prescribed fire strategies for an uncertain future climate.
Over the last half-century, grassland bird populations have declined far more than any other bird group in North America. This is because native grasslands were largely replaced with croplands, and many remaining prairies are degraded. Land managers and conservation organizations are racing to preserve and restore these ecosystems to stem further loss of grassland birds. Given limited resources, bird habitat models are needed to help managers prioritize where conservation efforts will be most effective. In addition to habitat loss and degradation from land use change, altered fire regimes, and woody encroachment, increasing greenhouse gas emissions will likely change temperatures and rainfall patterns across North American grasslands. The effects of these changes in climate are expected to cascade to vegetation communities and the bird species that depend on them. To date, predictions for bird responses to a changing climate have focused on changes in temperature and precipitation, but vegetation productivity (and therefore grassland bird habitat) also depends on factors such as vegetation type and soils. In this project, researchers will study how vegetation influences grassland birds across the western Great Plains and create maps of projected bird distribution given vegetation and land use change under multiple future climate scenarios. Anticipating future bird distribution will help partners understand the regional and climate contexts of site-level projects, including USDA-Agriculture Research Service scientists seeking to target real world solutions for grazing land management that enhance livestock production and bird conservation. These maps will also help Audubon Rockies as they plan expansion of the Conservation Ranching Initiative, which helps ensure livestock grazing operations are “bird friendly” and will provide guidance for conservation actions implemented by Private Lands Biologists with Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. Modules and a web-based application accompanying these maps will increase capacity among Federal, State, Tribal, and private land managers and decision makers in their conservation planning under a changing climate.
Invasions of exotic annual grasses (EAGs like cheatgrass have caused major losses of native shrubs and grasses in western U.S. rangelands. They also decrease the productivity and carbon storage in these ecosystems, which is expected to create dryer soils that may cause further losses in plant productivity. This cycle is the hallmark of desertification – or, fertile lands turning into deserts. Management actions that target EAGs are one of the most widespread land management actions taken in Western U.S. rangelands, but it is unclear which specific actions can simultaneously enhance drought resilience of native plant communities and increase carbon sequestration and storage. This project aims to identify the restoration treatments that are effective in combating EAGs in western rangelands by collecting data to describe the impacts of EAGs on soil carbon and to determine when, where, and how restoration actions such as applying herbicides or planting perennial native plants affect soil carbon and drought resilience. To address a key concern of land managers, the public, and national policy-makers, project researchers will work with a team of land managers across Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado to 1) refine and confirm the suitability of sampling locations, 2) connect with private landowners and land managers to access sampling locations, 3) engage managers in the science discovery process (e.g., interpreting data results) to share ownership of the findings, and 4) co-produce translational guidance for carbon sequestration metrics and for what changes to expect in carbon sequestration and its co-benefits following restoration to prevent or rectify EAG invasions.
In the North Central region, invasive species and climate change are intricately linked to changing fire regimes, and together, these drivers can have pronounced effects on ecosystems. When fires burn too hot or too frequently, they can prevent slow-growing native plants from regrowing. When this happens, the landscape can transform into a new type of ecosystem, such as a forest becoming a grassland. This process is known as “ecosystem transformation”. This project will explore key management priorities including native community resilience and management of invasive species, wildfire, and ecosystem change, in a collaboration of researchers working directly with land managers and other stakeholders through the North Central Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (NC RISCC) network. The team will identify areas in the North Central region that have experienced ecological transformation due to invasive grasses and their interactions with wildfire or climate change; calculate changes in carbon storage that have accompanied these transformations; and determine areas that are vulnerable to future transformation. Researchers will also identify which management practices enhance carbon storage, a key ecosystem service that agencies want to include in management plans and strategies, yet largely have not yet done so. Through this project, managers and researchers will gain a better understanding of the processes behind ecosystem transformation, as well as the carbon consequences of these changes and the management practices that can address them. This work can be used to adapt management plans for important ecosystem services that may be agency- or organization-specific, including carbon storage, native plant diversity, and ecosystem resilience. This work is critical to addressing the interactions of climate change with both invasive grasses and wildfire, as well as identifying adaptation strategies to restore carbon in forests and shrublands across the North Central region after these disturbances.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the largest area of public lands in the United States and manages those lands for diverse and sometimes conflicting resources, uses, and values. As a result, decision-making on BLM lands is complex. Decisions that are informed by the best available science – including climate science – are more likely to allow public land managers to balance different desired uses and values across public landscapes and achieve long-term land management goals. Strengthening the use of science and climate information in federal decision making is a priority for the current administration and for federal agencies, including the BLM. The Climate Adaptation Science Centers are committed to developing climate science that is relevant to decision making. However, conducting a comprehensive review of available science, including climate science, is challenging for BLM land managers due to the volume of science often available and the limited time staff have to compile and synthesize that information. The goal of this project is to develop (and evaluate the utility of) a family of climate-informed short science syntheses and accompanying worked environmental impact analysis examples. Both products will include climate sections to help land managers more quickly understand and assess the influence of changing climate conditions on resources. Both products will also be specifically designed to provide information and analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The BLM conducts well over a thousand comprehensive NEPA analyses each year to analyze and disclose to the public the potential environmental impacts of each of their decisions. Thus the products produced in this project, which will focus in the sagebrush biome where many BLM lands occur, has the potential to strengthen science use in hundreds of public lands decisions each year. The project will be conducted in partnership with BLM and US FWS to help ensure that the resulting products are useful and used by managers to strengthen the science, and climate science, foundation for public land management.
Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems is crucial for successful grassland management in the 21st century. In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS NC CASC) began a project to establish a baseline of information to best serve grassland managers (that is, those who develop grassland management plans or implement those plans on the ground) at Federal, State, and Tribal agen-cies and nongovernmental organizations to help meet regional grassland management goals. This project “A Synthesis of Climate Impacts, Stakeholder Needs, and Adaptation in Northern Great Plains Grassland Ecosystems” (hereafter, the Grasslands Synthesis Project), had two primary goals: (1) to synthesize management goals and challenges for grassland managers across the region and (2) to assess the state-of-the-science and identify knowledge gaps for addressing the goals and challenges within the context of climate change. The findings from the Grasslands Syn-thesis Project are described in two volumes. This report serves several purposes, including providing (1) a synthesis of regional grassland management goals and challenges, (2) identification of information needs relevant to grassland management in a changing climate, and (3) summaries of grassland management issues by ecoregion and management organization or agency.
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 on temperature, water availability, wildfire, vegetation, wildlife, large-bodied ruminants, grazing, and land-use change and the implications for grassland management in the North Central region. This open-file report also identifies areas in which further research is needed. U.S. Geological Survey funded this project.
Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and postfire climate, which influences seedling establishment. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than projected climate change impacts for most species, suggesting that reductions in fire severity, and resultant impacts on seed availability, could partially offset expected climate-driven declines in postfire regeneration. Across 40 to 42% of the study area, we project postfire conifer regeneration to be likely following low-severity but not high-severity fire under future climate scenarios (2031 to 2050). However, increasingly warm, dry climate conditions are projected to eventually outweigh the influence of fire severity and seed availability. The percent of the study area considered unlikely to experience conifer regeneration, regardless of fire severity, increased from 5% in 1981 to 2000 to 26 to 31% by mid-century, highlighting a limited time window over which management actions that reduce fire severity may effectively support postfire conifer regeneration.
Grasslands in the northern Great Plains are important ecosystems that support local economies, tribal communities, livestock grazing, diverse plant and animal communities, and large-scale migrations of big game ungulates, grassland birds, and waterfowl. Climate change and variability impact how people and animals live on and interact with grasslands, and can bring more frequent droughts, fires, or new plant species that make managing these landscapes challenging. Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century first requires a synthesis of what is known across all of these scales and a gap analysis to identify key areas to focus future research.