The NC CASC hosts a variety of virtual and in-person workshops to build partnerships, collaborate and share information among the natural resources community including participants representing federal and state agency employees, university researchers, graduate students and others. Many of these workshops have been aimed at providing guidance on specific climate change tools and products that can be used to better integrate climate science into management and research. Some example topics include using climate data to understand global environmental change, climate change scenario planning, and snow-related data and information needs and next steps for modeling future snow projections. To learn more about NC CASC workshops, please visit the Events webpage.  

The NC CASC hosted a remote Python workshop for resource managers and climate scientists in October 2020. The workshop covered the basics of using scientific programming with Python to analyze and visualize netcdf MACA v2 climate data. All of the workshop lessons, along with hundreds of others, can be found on Earth Labs free open education learning portal and the interactive activities from the event can be found on GitHub. Given the clear need for this type of training, the NC CASC plans to host more data-intensive workshops like this one in the future.  

The NC CASC provides quantitative summaries of downscaled climate and hydrology projections for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Region 6 Species Status Assessments (SSAs) and other stakeholders.

This paper examines the impact of production network economies on designing cost-effective conservation targeting strategies. We first develop a theoretical model to study the decision to convert land from an extensive (or biodiversity-friendly) use to an intensive use (e.g., crop agriculture) in the presence of network economies in land use returns. The model supports the possibility of multiple land use equilibria due to network economies and identifies policy outcomes that increase welfare. Bandwagon effects can occur whereby spatial production spillovers from lands under intensive use can prompt further conversions on proximate lands under extensive use. Conversely, conservation sites can be placed strategically to block conversion cascades. Lands that support moderate ecological benefits but have strong intensive use potential are desirable conservation targets when these preempt conversion cascades, which is in contrast with the conservation strategies that aim to maximize ecological benefits per unit cost. When network economies exist in land use returns as well as in ecological benefits, a Pigouvian subsidy is shown to favor extensive land cover while a subsidy payment upon preservation of adjacent lands can tilt incentives in favor of either land use. We illustrate our findings with landscape-level simulations calibrated to the U.S. Prairie Pothole Region (PPR). Finally, we estimate grassland conversion hazard by employing satellite imagery to provide statistical evidence for land use network economies in the PPR.

FY 2021 Projects from the USGS North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC). Contact: casc@usgs.gov

A workshop was conducted to gain insight into climate change impacts and climate-informed management actions of relevance to a habitat management plan in the North Central region. A pre-workshop and post-workshop survey were conducted.