Improving the quality of habitat for western big-game species, such as elk and mule deer, was identified as a priority by the Department of the Interior in 2018. Maintaining healthy herds not only supports the ecosystems where these species are found, but also the hunting and wildlife watching communities. For example, in Wyoming, big game hunting contributed over $300 million to the state’s economy in 2015. Yet as climate conditions change, the quantity, quality, and timing of vegetation available to mule deer, elk, and other ungulates, known as forage, could shift. It’s possible that these changes could have cascading impacts on the behavior and population sizes of many species. A key strategy used by managers to improve forage availability and adapt to change is the implementation of habitat treatments. These treatments include prescribed fire, forest thinning, and removal of invasive weeds, and are currently being planned to counteract the expected decline in mule deer habitat in the Kemmerer-Cokeville Area of southwestern Wyoming. To ensure that these activities are effective in meeting their goals, it is important for managers to have information on how forage conditions are already changing due to climate variability, and what any potential tradeoffs associated with these techniques may be. Focusing on Montana and Wyoming, this project aims to meet this need by achieving three objectives. First, researchers will prepare summaries of past and future changes in forage by watershed, herd, and hunting area for both states. These summaries will help managers prioritize areas for management by providing baseline information about the direction, degree, and certainty of change in the quality and timing of forage. Second, researchers will assess changes in forage conditions in aspen, sagebrush, and mixed mountain shrub habitat in southwest Wyoming. They will develop maps of future forage based on scenarios that reflect probabilities of important weather patterns (such as drought), the current distribution of invasive cheatgrass (which decreases forage quality), and expected effects of planned habitat treatments, such as prescribed fire. Lastly, researchers will use these maps to evaluate the effects of treatment options on mule deer migration, fawning, and summer habitat, and on elk calving, migration, and habitat use. The results of this project will be useful to a broad range of managers, including those with the states of Wyoming and Montana, and with federal agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Successful management of elk and mule deer habitat will support healthy populations and ecosystems, as well as recreational opportunities that feed valuable revenue into local and state economies.
The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is an expansive region that covers parts of five Midwestern states and three Canadian provinces. This region contains millions of wetlands in which waterfowl breed and from which 50-80% of the continent's migratory ducks originate each year. Previous modeling efforts indicated that climate change would result in a shift of suitable waterfowl breeding habitat from the central PPR to the southeastern portion of the region, an area where the majority of wetlands have been drained. If this future scenario were to materialize, a significant restoration effort would be needed in the southeastern PPR to support waterfowl production. However, more recent research has revealed that changes in climate are influencing these critical wetland habitats in novel ways, and previous modeling results may no longer be valid. Land and natural resource managers are in need of more accurate, up-to-date scientific information in order to make fully informed planning decisions about these important wetlands and waterfowl habitat. This project aimed to improve our understanding of how future climate changes might impact wetland ecosystems and waterfowl habitats of the PPR. Project researchers used a newly developed wetland simulation model to simulate hydrologic and chemical conditions of prairie pothole wetlands under various climate change scenarios. Results were compared to results from previous modeling and analysis efforts to gain a better understanding of future impacts to wetlands and the ability of prairie pothole wetlands to continue meeting the habitat needs of breeding waterfowl. Throughout this effort, the project team worked directly with land managers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Habitat and Population Evaluation Team and Chase Lake Wetland Management District in North Dakota to ensure that study results and science products can directly inform climate adaptation plans for waterfowl habitat.
The Missouri River system is the life-blood of the American Midwest, providing critical water resources that drive the region’s agriculture, industry, hydroelectric power generation, and ecosystems. The basin has a long history of development and diversion of water resources, meaning that streamflow records that reflect natural, unmanaged flows over the past century have been rare. As a result, research on the complex interactions between temperature and precipitation in driving droughts and surface water variability in the Missouri River Basin has lagged behind similar work done in other major basins in the country, and has hindered drought planning efforts. To address this need, researchers will use tree-rings to develop reconstructions of historic, natural streamflow in the Upper Missouri River Basin. This will be the first such network of hydrologic reconstructions for the basin. Specifically, the tree-ring analysis will provide information on precipitation, temperature, and streamflow for the basin going back 800 years. This historical information will then be used to explore the drivers of drought and periods of high flow in the basin, beyond just precipitation. For example, evidence suggests that temperature is an increasingly important driver of drought, and an analysis of the impacts of warming temperatures on streamflow can be used to help managers anticipate future impacts on water supplies in the basin. Lastly, researchers will work closely with engineers and water managers with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation to integrate information on droughts and natural variability in streamflow into their water operations and drought planning efforts. Through this effort, researchers will seek to address questions such as “what are the impacts to current water operations under severe droughts, like the 1930s Dust Bowl or 1500s megadrought?” and “how could operations be changed to improve water management for droughts like these, given projected future warming?”. This information will help water managers in the Missouri River Basin develop adaptation strategies to manage the future range of potential drought and flood events in the basin, ultimately helping to reduce the billions of dollars that these events cost today in infrastructure and economic impact.
Changing climate conditions can make water management planning and drought preparedness decisions more complicated than ever before. Resource managers can no longer rely solely on historical data and trends to base their actions, and are in need of science that is relevant to their specific needs and can directly inform important planning decisions. Questions remain, however, regarding the most effective and efficient methods for extending scientific knowledge and products into management and decision-making. This study analyzed two unique cases of water management to better understand how science can be translated into resource management actions and decision-making. In particular, this project sought to understand 1) the characteristics that make science actionable and useful for water resource management and drought preparedness, and 2) the ideal types of scientific knowledge or science products that facilitate the use of science in management and decision-making. The first case study focused on beaver mimicry, an emerging nature-based solution that increases the presence of wood and woody debris in rivers and streams to mimic the actions of beavers. This technique has been rapidly adopted by natural resource managers as a way to restore riparian areas, increase groundwater infiltration, and slow surface water flow so that more water is available later in the year during hotter and dryer months. The second case study focused on an established research program, Colorado Dust on Snow, that provides water managers with scientific information explaining how the movement of dust particles from the Colorado Plateau influences hydrology and the timing and intensity of snow melt and water runoff into critical water sources. This program has support from and is being used by several water conservation districts in the state. Understanding how scientific knowledge translates into action and decision-making in these cases is expected to strengthen our knowledge of actionable science in the context of drought and its impacts on ecosystems. The project team gathered qualitative data through stakeholder interviews and will conduct an extensive literature review. Findings from these efforts will also be incorporated into a broader Intermountain West synthesis effort to determine and assess commonalities and differences among socio-ecological aspects of drought adaptation and planning.
The bison, which has long served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior, became the official national mammal of the United States in 2016. Bison played a key role in shaping the grasslands of the Great Plains for millennia, but today they are confined to unnaturally small ranges. National parks, including four in the Great Plains, provide a major last bastion for wild bison. Herds in Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are wild in that their movements are unconstrained within their park’s designated bison range, they receive no supplemental feed, minerals, or veterinary attention, and social interactions are not constrained. To maintain natural ecosystem conditions for wild bison within these parks, park managers regularly make decisions that affect bison herds, the animal communities they interact with, and the plant communities that support them. Until now, these decisions have focused on individual parks’ bison herds. The National Park Service has set forth a new initiative that strives to increase managers’ consideration of a broader range of issues when making bison management decisions in order to achieve region-wide objectives. This initiative will culminate in the National Park Service Midwest Region Strategic Bison Management Plan. As part of this effort, the initiative’s leadership team identified the need for a tool that evaluates the feasibility of maintaining desired bison health and ecosystem conditions in parks with bison herds under a range of potential management and climate scenarios, and that assesses how short-term management decisions could impact long-term objectives. To address this need, researchers will bring together NPS managers, biologists, and decision-makers, together with USGS and university scientists, to develop specific objectives for the bison management plan and to develop a detailed implementation plan for the production of such a tool. Close manager-scientist collaboration from the onset of the project will ensure a shared understanding of the tool’s function and capabilities. This project will serve as a first step towards the development of innovative future management of bison in national parks.
Tribes and tribal lands in the Northern Rockies/Northern Plains region are already experiencing the effects of climate change, and tribal managers are also already responding to and preparing for the impacts of those changes. However, these managers face many challenges and obstacles to either completing and/or implementing their adaptation plans. The overall goal of this project is to provide tribal managers in this region the opportunity to share experiences, challenges, and successes with each other in order to support climate adaptation efforts. The project researchers will plan and conduct a workshop for tribes in the north central region that are in some stage of climate adaptation planning or implementation. This project is a collaboration between Colorado State University and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes who will build on previous workshops held by the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) that focused on providing participating tribes with basic information about climate change, adaptation planning, and vulnerability assessments. The project team will work with ITEP to develop the next iteration (“2.0”) of tribal climate adaptation workshops to facilitate tribal managers in their efforts to complete the climate adaptation process. This project will result in tribal managers who are better equipped to carry out adaptation planning, which will ultimately help lessen the harmful impacts of climate change on tribal lands, resources, and communities in the region.
Lakes, reservoirs, and ponds are central and integral features of the North Central U.S. These water bodies provide aesthetic, cultural, and ecosystem services to surrounding wildlife and human communities. External impacts – such as climate change – can have significant impacts to these important parts of the region’s landscape. Understanding the responses of lakes to these drivers is critical for species conservation and management decisions. Water temperature data are foundational to providing this understanding and are currently the most widely measured of all aquatic parameters with over 400 unique groups monitoring water temperature in U.S. lakes and rivers. However, lake temperature data are lacking at the relevant spatial and temporal scales needed for decision-making, and there has been a lack of national coordination and synthesis of these data collection efforts. Assembling and harmonizing this wealth of data would provide a valuable resource for modeling, analyzing, and predicting water temperature. This project will build upon previous work funded by the Northeast CASC that provided a foundation for modeling and predicting water temperature of approximately 11,000 lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Project researchers are expanding those efforts by using the modeling techniques from the previous project, along with existing temperature data, to reconstruct a historical record of water temperatures from 1979 to 2018 and generate predictions for tens of thousands of lakes in the prairie pothole region of North and South Dakota. With this information, the team will also analyze the habitat suitability of these lakes to several fish species. Data from this project will help water and natural resource managers clarify and quantify risks to fish populations, for example by identifying where the preferred thermal habitat of a species is projected to disappear and put the fish at risk of local extirpation. Results will be directly relevant to understanding the health of water resources in the North Central U.S. and can inform specific conservation actions.
The Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) 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 Wind River. In recent years, however, the region has experienced frequent severe droughts, which have affected tribal livelihoods and cultural activities. Scientists with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) at Colorado State University, the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and several other university and agency partners in the region worked in close partnership with tribal water managers to assess how drought affects the reservation, which included the integration of social, ecological, and hydro-climatological sciences with local knowledge. The study revealed a long history with drought in the region, as well as issues that limit the tribe’s ability to manage their water resources. In addition, changing hydroclimate conditions were identified that can result in changing drought characteristics, which increases the need for adaptive management strategies. The findings are helping to inform the creation of a climate monitoring system and drought management plan, which have been supported with additional technical and financial support from the High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC) and NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). The drought plan will integrate 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 will 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 also engaged in educational activities related to water resources and drought preparedness through joint activities with Wyoming Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to build the tribe’s ability to response to future drought.
Changing climate conditions could have significant impacts on wildlife health. Shifts in temperature and precipitation may directly affect the occurrence of disease in fish and wildlife by altering their interactions with pathogens (such as the bacterium that causes Lyme disease), helping vectors like mosquitoes and ticks expand their range, or speeding up the time it takes for a parasite to develop from an egg to an adult. Climate change can also indirectly affect the health of fish and wildlife as their habitats change. For example, reduced food availability could lead to overcrowding and increased disease transmission, or warmer temperatures might increase stress levels, weakening immune systems and making animals more susceptible to disease. The goal of this project is to review and synthesize existing information on the impacts of climate change on fish and wildlife health across North America. Researchers will develop a searchable database containing this information, and will use that database to identify gaps in knowledge and unique areas of concern. Through a symposium with DOI scientists and stakeholders, including resource managers, state agencies, and tribes, researchers will define near-term science priorities for better understanding the impacts of climate change on wildlife health and will identify potential adaptation strategies.