The Climate Adaptation Science Centers have conducted numerous training and skills development activities to support tribal and indigenous partners as they seek to use scientific information and techniques to understand and respond to climate change impacts. Because these activities were generated in different CASC regions, with different tribal / indigenous stakeholders, climate change contexts, and training needs, and because the CASC network encourages innovation, these activities were not developed or implemented in a nationally consistent format. This project seeks to identify relevant activities, gather related materials and links that might benefit others seeking to implement similar activities, provide a basic assessment of content and skills provided across the network, and identify significant apparent gaps in providing these critical skills. It is expected that future phases of this work will seek to develop a more-coherent training curriculum and framework.

Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Paleohydrologic records can provide unique, long-term perspectives on streamflow variability and hydroclimate for use in water resource planning. Such long-term records can also play a key role in placing both present day events and projected future conditions into a broader context than that offered by instrumental observations. However, relative to other major river basins across the western United States, a paucity of streamflow reconstructions has to date prevented the full application of such paleohydrologic information in the Upper Missouri River Basin. Here we utilize a set of naturalized streamflow records for the Upper Missouri and an expanded network of tree-ring records to reconstruct streamflow at thirty-one gaging locations across the major headwaters of the basin. The reconstructions explain an average of 68% of the variability in the observed streamflow records and extend available records of streamflow back to 886 CE on average. Basin-wide analyses suggest unprecedented hydroclimatic variability over the region during the Medieval period, similar to that observed in the Upper Colorado River Basin, and show considerable synchrony of persistent wet-dry phasing with the Colorado River over the last 1200 years. Streamflow estimates in individual sub-basins of the Upper Missouri demonstrate increased spatial variability in discharge during the Little Ice Age (∼1400–1850 CE) compared with the Medieval Climate Anomaly (∼800–1400 CE). The network of streamflow reconstructions presented here fills a major geographical void in paleohydrologic understanding and now allows for a long-term assessment of hydrological variability over the majority of the western U.S.

Although drought is a natural part of climate across the north-central United States, how drought is experienced and responded to is the result of complex biophysical and social processes. Climate change assessments indicate drought impacts will likely worsen in the future, which will further challenge decision-making. Here, a drought management decision typology is empirically developed from synthesis of three in-depth case studies using a modified grounded-theory approach. The typology highlights 1) the entity or entities involved, 2) management sectors, 3) decision types, 4) spatial and temporal scale(s) of decision-making, and 5) barriers that inhibit decision-making. Findings indicate similarities in decision types and barriers across cases. Changes in operations, practices, or behaviors; information and technology; and legal or policy changes were the most common decision types, while commonly cited barriers were institutional constraints, fragmented decision-making, and limited personnel and financial resources. Yet barriers and responses also differed within and between sectors and jurisdictions. Several barriers inhibited anticipatory, regional, and interagency drought response, such as limited institutional support, competing mandates, limited resources, lack of usable information, limits to interagency fund transfers, and historical context and distrust among entities. Findings underscore the importance of documenting nuanced decision-making in local places and broader generalizations in decision-making across scales. This contributes to the goal of developing drought science that is actionable for decision-making.

From Public Summary: (One of the greatest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, and how climate change effects will unfold. In order to plan for this uncertain future, managers have begun to use a tool known as climate change scenario planning, in which data from climate models are used to identify different plausible future climate conditions and their impacts, known as “scenarios,” for a specific area.   In a previous project, we (scientists with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, and National Park Service) worked with natural resource managers at Badlands National Park and on surrounding federal and tribal lands to assess how different climate conditions and management activities would affect the area’s resources. To make the results of this work more accessible to managers and the public, the present project produced a National Park Service “Resource Brief” summarizing insights from a scenario planning workshop and an ecological simulation model built specifically for the focus area. The Brief highlights actions that the park can take to address resource management challenges associated with the range of plausible climate futures.   Building on the work at Badlands, we also designed and pilot-tested a process for deeply integrating climate change scenario planning into National Park Service (NPS) Resource Stewardship Strategies. These strategies are part of NPS’s streamlined approach for guiding prioritization of a park’s investments in resource stewardship. The process we designed helped managers at the case study park – Devils Tower National Monument – adjust their resource management goals to be achievable across the range of plausible climate futures, and to prioritize activities that will prepare the park for whatever future climate materializes.   We then documented this integration process as a supplement to standard Resource Stewardship Strategy preparation guidance followed by each park as it develops its Strategy. This allows the lessons learned in this case study to be applied to many other parks across the nation.)  

Abstract From: (The growth and distribution of plant species in water limited environments is often limited by the atmospheric evaporative demands which us measured in terms of potential evaporation (PET). While PET estimated by different methods have been widely used to assess vegetation response to climate change, species distribution models offer unique opportunity to compare their efficiency in predicting habitat suitability of plant species. In this study, we perform the first multi-species comparison of two widely used metrics of PET i.e., Penman-Monteith and Thornthwaite, and show how they result in similar or different on projected distribution of water limited species and potential consequences on their conservation strategies across North Central U.S. To build species distribution models of eight species, we used two sets of environmental predictors which were identical except for the metric of PET (Penman-Monthith vs Thornthwaite) and projected habitat suitability for historical (2005) and future (0399) periods. We found an excellent model performance with no difference under two sets of predictors (AUC + ~0.93). The relative influence of Thornthwaite PET on habitat prediction was higher than Penman PET for most of the species. We observered that the area of the projected suitable habitat was always higher under Thornthwaite set of predictors which were than Penman set of predictors (ranges from 25% to 941%), with the exception of Pinus contorta for which the reverse was true. In most cases, these differences were non-trivial, indicating that the choice of the PET metric, although both of them are commonly used, can have dramatic consequences on the conservation management decisions. Therefore, the conservation management decisions can be markedly different depending on the choice of the PET metric used for species distribution modeling of water limited species.)

The Department of the Interior Bison Conservation Initiative calls for its bureaus to plan and implement collaborative American bison conservation and to ensure involvement by tribal, state, and local governments and the public in that conservation. Four independently managed and geographically separated National Park Service (NPS) units in Interior Region 5 (IR5) preserve bison and other components of a formerly contiguous Great Plains landscape. Management of bison in IR5 parks has historically been specific to each park, and livestock and range management science informed much of the decision making. In the past two decades, NPS has shifted away from managing bison from this livestock-based perspective towards a wildlife stewardship approach, including ensuring their long-term adaptive potential and considering them as just one part of a complex ecosystem. This shift requires a more holistic and cooperative approach to stewardship that is challenging not only because of limitations in funding and fluctuations in leadership priorities, but also because of the constraints imposed by the parks’ relatively small, fenced areas. The IR5 NPS Bison Stewardship Strategy (“Strategy”) will help the NPS to meet its responsibilities in cooperative stewardship of bison. The Strategy will serve to organize and consolidate the NPS’s legal and policy responsibilities within a framework of collectively defined values and objectives to support the careful and transparent decision-making processes that both guide and transcend parkspecific planning. This report describes a preliminary decision framework for the Strategy, including the context, the fundamental objectives, and a range of alternative strategies developed and considered through two workshops and a series of conference calls with NPS personnel, stakeholders, and outside experts with an interest in IR5 NPS bison stewardship. Although not the Strategy itself, this framework serves as the Strategy’s starting point and identifies 14 fundamental objectives, falling in four major themes: Persistence of Wild and Healthy Bison 1. Maximize the long-term persistence of bison in IR5 parks 2. Maximize the long-term adaptive capacity of bison in North America 3. Maximize the wildness of the bison herds 4. Maximize humane treatment of bison, while allowing natural processes to occur

Abstract From: ScienceDirect (Pinyon-juniper (PJ) plant communities cover a large area across North America and provide critical habitat for wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and rich cultural resources. These communities occur across a variety of environmental gradients, disturbance regimes, structural conditions and species compositions, including three species of juniper and two species of pinyon. PJ communities have experienced substantial changes in recent decades and identifying appropriate management strategies for these diverse communities is a growing challenge. Here, we surveyed the literature and compiled 441 studies to characterize patterns in research on PJ communities through time, across geographic space and climatic conditions, and among focal species. We evaluate the state of knowledge for three focal topics: 1) historical stand dynamics and responses to disturbance, 2) land management actions and their effects, and 3) potential future responses to changing climate. We identified large and potentially important gaps in our understanding of pinyon-juniper communities both geographically and topically. The effect of drought on Pinus edulis, the pinyon pine species in eastern PJ communities was frequently addressed, while few studies focused on drought effects on Pinus monophylla, which occurs in western PJ communities. The largest proportion of studies that examined land management actions only measured their effects for one year. Grazing was a common land-use across the geographic range of PJ communities yet was rarely studied. We found only 39 studies that had information on the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and most were concentrated on Pinus edulis. These results provide a synthetic perspective on PJ communities that can help natural resource managers identify relevant knowledge needed for decision-making and researchers design new studies to fill important knowledge gaps.)

Abstract: (From: Wiley Online Library) Relative agricultural productivity shocks emerging from climate change will alter regional cropland use. Land allocations are sensitive to crop profits that in turn depend on yield effects induced by changes in climate and technology. We develop and apply an integrated framework to assess the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity and land use for the U.S. Northern Great Plains. Crop‐specific yield‐weather models reveal crop comparative advantage due to differential yield impacts of weather across the region's major crops, i.e., alfalfa, wheat, soybeans and maize. We define crop profits as a function of the weather‐driven yields, which are then used to model land use allocation decisions. This ultimately allows us to simulate the impact of climate change under the RCP4.5 emissions scenario on land allocated to the region's major crops as well as to grass/pasture. Upon removing the trends effects in yields, climate change is projected to lower yields by 33%‐64% over 2031‐’55 relative to 1981–2005, with soybean being the least and alfalfa the most affected crops. Yield projections applied to the land use model at present‐day input costs and output prices reveals that Dakotas’ grass acreage will increase by up to 23%, displacing croplands. Wheat acreage is expected to increase by up to 54% in select south‐eastern counties of North Dakota and South Dakota, where maize/soy acreage had increased by up to 58% during 1995–2016. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved