The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in 94 units, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to address potential future effects of management practices and climate change. The goal of this project is to outline the steps required for developing NPS grazing management plans, to identify information needs and availability for these planning processes, and to initiate a scenario-based pilot project for meeting these needs at a given park unit. This will serve as an important step toward developing a transferable process to help parks ensure that grazing management practices are responsive and adaptive to future climate change.   In the first phase of the project, the team will engage resource managers from three NPS units in western Colorado: Dinosaur National Monument (DINO), Curecanti National Recreation Area (CURE), and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (BLCA). Working with resource managers and subject-matter experts, the team will articulate and describe the planning processes and available information with regard to NPS grazing management. The team will then convene researchers, managers, subject-matter experts, and climate change adaptation specialists at a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to develop a small set (3-5) of challenging, plausible, relevant, and divergent future scenarios that qualitatively assess how grazing resources and management at DINO may be affected under climate change. Concurrently, the process will identify common key characteristics that may be regionally applicable to BLCA and CURE, and will consider caveats for broader use at parks managing grazing in other regional biomes. Workshop participants will provide input on the project and process, identify quantitative information needs, and offer recommendations for streamlining the effort into a scalable, transferable approach that could be used to guide other park units seeking to update their own grazing management plans.    A potential second phase of this project would entail the development of a modeling approach to provide quantitative information to NPS units that allow livestock grazing. This task would leverage recent advances in our ability to model grazing activities to evaluate the effects of climate change and management actions on vegetation within a specific park unit. Management actions that could be evaluated include stocking rates, prescribed fire, and invasive plant management practices.

Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities are found in western North America and comprise a mix of shrubs, forbs, and grasses. Climate, topography, and soil water availability are important factors that shape big sagebrush stand structure and plant community composition; however, most studies have focused on understanding these relationships at sites in a small portion of the big sagebrush region. Our goal was to characterize detailed stand structure and plant composition patterns and identify environmental variables related to those patterns by sampling 15 sites distributed across the western United States. In each site, we characterized stand structure at the individual shrub level and at the site level. We quantified size distributions and assessed relationships among canopyvolume, age, and height. We also characterized functional type cover and species composition and related those to climatic, topographic, and edaphic variables. Mean big sagebrush age ranged from 21 (± 8) to 57 (± 22) yr at individual sites, mean height ranged from 0.23 (± 0.12) to 0.67 (± 0.23) m, and mean canopy volume ranged from 0.03 (± 0.04) to 0.62 (± 0.51) m3. Bare ground and litter contributed the most cover (mean = 64%), followed by big sagebrush (mean = 39% of vascular plant cover). There was a negative relationship between big sagebrush cover and grass and forb cover. Species composition was related to both climate and elevation, likely because these variables influence water availability. Although our study was limited to 15 field sites, our detailed descriptions of widely distributed sites provide insight into the magnitude of variability in big sagebrush plant community structure.

This project facilitated the engagement of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s (NC CASC) Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) to identify and address the physical climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and natural resource managers in the NC CASC region, as well as meet their needs for climate information to assess impacts to their desired system and develop strategies for effective climate adaptation. A drought index called the Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) was developed to provide a near real-time assessment of soil moisture conditions across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) based on satellite observations. This projects also supported development of climate scenarios for different stakeholder-driven projects. New utilities were added to another drought index, the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), that our team has previously developed. The project team also put together a book chapter that examinesthe relevance of the concept of evaporative demand and extremes in evaporative demand during the 21st century for drought assessment and monitoring.