The Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming is home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, who reside near and depend on water from the streams that feed into the Wind River. In recent years, however, the region has experienced frequent severe droughts, which have impacted tribal livelihoods and cultural activities.   Scientists with the North Central Climate Science Center at Colorado State University, the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and several other university and agency partners are working closely with tribal water managers to assess how drought affects the reservation, integrating social, ecological, and hydro-climatological sciences with local knowledge. The findings were intended to help inform the creation of a climate monitoring system and drought management plan, which are being supported with additional technical and financial support from the High Plains Regional Climate Center and NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System. The drought plan integrated climate science with hydrologic, social, and ecological vulnerabilities and risks, and identify response capacities and strategies to support the Tribal Water Code and related resources management. Ultimately, the plan was designed to help the tribes ensure that agricultural and other societal needs are met during times of drought.   As part of the project, tribal water managers and the public were engaged in educational activities related to water resources and drought preparedness through joint activities with Wyoming Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research to build the tribes’ ability to respond to future drought. Additionally, the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado-Boulder and the project team evaluated team processes and outputs to document “lessons learned” from the collaborative process to support the transfer of knowledge to other tribes and non-tribal entities in the region and beyond.

One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, and how climate change effects will unfold. While models can be used to predict the types of impacts that climate change might have on a landscape, uncertainty remains surrounding factors such as how quickly changes will occur and how specific resources will respond.   In order to plan for this uncertain future, managers have begun to use a tool known as scenario planning. In this approach, a subset of global climate model projections are selected that represent a range of plausible future climate scenarios for a particular area. Through a series of facilitated workshops, managers can then explore different management options under each scenario, enabling them to be proactive in the face of uncertainty. However, selecting and synthesizing climate information for scenario planning requires significant time and skills, and it can be difficult to predict exactly how resources might respond to a combination of climate, management actions, and other factors.   Therefore, the goals of this project were to develop a process for creating regional climate summaries that can also be used for local scenario planning, and to pilot an approach for enhancing scenario planning through simulation modeling. Researchers drew on global climate model projections to develop several climate summaries for the northern Great Plains region. The summaries are expected to be used for local-scale climate adaptation planning efforts for Badlands National Park (South Dakota) and Knife River Indian Villages National Historical Site (North Dakota) and surrounding federal and tribal lands. A final step was to develop a simulation model for the South Dakota site to help managers address the “what if” questions regarding how management actions might affect focal resources under the different scenarios.   Not only is this project meant to improve climate adaptation efforts in the northern Great Plains region, but it is also expected to result in a new, integrative approach for identifying how climate change might affect key resources of management concern at a local-scale and what actions can be taken to protect these resources – a method that could be applied to management units across the country.

Covering 120 million acres across 14 western states and 3 Canadian provinces, sagebrush provides critical habitat for species such as pronghorn, mule deer, and sage-grouse – a species of conservation concern. The future of these and other species is closely tied to the future of sagebrush. Yet this important ecosystem has already been affected by fire, invasive species, land use conversion, and now, climate change.   In the western U.S., temperatures are rising and precipitation patterns are changing. However, there is currently a limited ability to anticipate the impacts of climate change on sagebrush. Current methods suffer from a range of weakness that limits the reliability of results. In fact, the current uncertainty about future changes in sagebrush has been identified as a critical constraint on climate change adaptation planning in the West. To address this need, researchers forecasted the effects of climate change on the distribution and abundance of sagebrush, and integrated several modeling approaches that take into account historical data, disturbances such as fire, and changes in temperature and precipitation. This integrated method is expected to produce more accurate estimates of future sagebrush distribution and abundance.   The results of this research will be effectively communicated to land managers so that they can inform conservation planning, and sage-grouse management in particular, across the Intermountain West. Improved sagebrush forecasting will increase the capacity of land managers to prioritize future investments in sagebrush conservation and management by identifying areas where sagebrush are most and least vulnerable to climate change.

This capacity-building activity supported three tribal college and university (TCU) mini-­grants to initiate student phenological and meteorological observation projects in support of climate change research, to document impacts of climate change and development of indigenous geography curriculum.  Students made observations of culturally and/or traditionally significant plants to generate data sets for use in climate change impact assessment of these plants and plant communities. The activity contributed to the larger national efforts of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s “Indigenous  Geography” curricula, by engaging with students at tribal colleges to explore the linkage between the “seasonality” and “living world” themes. The program promoted the education of the students by introducing them to two national observation networks: the USA National Phenology Network  and the  Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. Data collected as part of these fellowships followed the protocol of these networks and, as such, contribute high-­quality data to the networks.  

Climate change is poised to alter natural systems, the frequency of extreme weather, and human health and livelihoods. In order to effectively prepare for and respond to these challenges in the north-central region of the U.S., people must have the knowledge and tools to develop plans and adaptation strategies. This project was a continuation of an effort begun in 2013 to build stakeholders’ capacity to respond to climate change in the north-central U.S. During the course of this project, researchers focused on two major activities:   Tribal Capacity Building: Researchers provided tribal colleges and universities with mini-grants to develop student projects to document climate-related changes in weather and culturally or traditionally significant plants. Data collected by students were made available for use in climate change impact assessments. The activity contributed to the expansion of the Indigenous Geography Phenology Network, a locally grounded, national network for documenting the impacts of climate change. Additionally, researchers collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Conservation Training Center to offer a climate training course in Rapid City, South Dakota, directed at tribal environmental professionals.   PhenoCam Analysis: Researchers provided ongoing technical support to maintain and begin to analyze the data from PhenoCams (streaming cameras) located across the north-central region. Observations collected by the PhenoCams were expected to help scientists track seasonal changes across the region and better understand how climate impacts living things.

The National Climate Assessment summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. A team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee produced the report, which was extensively reviewed by the public and experts, including federal agencies and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences. The report can be explored interactively at http://nca2014.globalchange.gov.

Ecological niche models predict plant responses to climate change by circumscribing species distributions within a multivariate environmental framework. Most projections based on modern bioclimatic correlations imply that high-elevation species are likely to be extirpated from their current ranges as a result of rising growing-season temperatures in the coming decades. Paleoecological data spanning the last 15,000 years from the Greater Yellowstone region describe the response of vegetation to past climate variability and suggest that white pines, a taxon of special concern in the region, have been surprisingly resilient to high summer temperature and fire activity in the past. Moreover, the fossil record suggests that winter conditions and biotic interactions have been critical limiting variables for high-elevation conifers in the past and will likely be so in the future. This long-term perspective offers insights on species responses to a broader range of climate and associated ecosystem changes than can be observed at present and should be part of resource management and conservation planning for the future.

Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2692-0/fulltext.html): The future rate of climate change in mountains has many potential human impacts, including those related to water resources, ecosystem services, and recreation. Analysis of the ensemble mean response of CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) shows amplified warming in high elevation regions during the cold season in boreal midlatitudes. We examine how the twenty-first century elevation-dependent response in the daily minimum surface air temperature [d(ΔTmin)/dz] varies among 27 different GCMs during winter for the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario. The focus is on regions within the northern hemisphere mid-latitude band between 27.5°N and 40°N, which includes both the Rocky Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau/Himalayas. We find significant variability in d(ΔTmin)/dz among the individual models ranging from 0.16 °C/km (10th percentile) to 0.97 °C/km (90th percentile), although nearly all of the GCMs (24 out of 27) show a significant positive value for d(ΔTmin)/dz. To identify some of the important drivers associated with the variability in d(ΔTmin)/dz during winter, we evaluate the co-variance between d(ΔTmin)/dz and the differential response of elevation-based anomalies in different climate variables as well as the GCMs’ spatial resolution, their global climate sensitivity, and their elevation-dependent free air temperature response. We find that d(ΔTmin)/dz has the strongest correlation with elevation-dependent increases in surface water vapor, followed by elevation-dependent decreases in surface albedo, and a weak positive correlation with the GCMs’ free air temperature response.

UNL scientists are part of a coalition helping two American Indian tribes prepare for drought and other climate fluctuations. The tribes — the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, both located on the Wind River Indian Reservation in western Wyoming — have worked with climate and social scientists in the past year to prepare regular climate and drought summaries for use in making water and resource decisions. A second phase, launched this summer, includes UNL's Cody Knutson and will generate a vulnerability assessment designed to help the tribes reduce the likelihood of future drought-related impacts. Read More:   http://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/unltoday/article/researchers-help-tribes-enhance-drought-and-climate-resilience/