Abstract (from IOPScience): Ecological droughts are deficits in soil-water availability that induce threshold-like ecosystem responses, such as causing altered or degraded plant-community conditions, which can be exceedingly difficult to reverse. However, 'ecological drought' can be difficult to define, let alone to quantify, especially at spatial and temporal scales relevant to land managers. This is despite a growing need to integrate drought-related factors into management decisions as climate changes result in precipitation instability in many semi-arid ecosystems. We asked whether success in restoration seedings of the foundational species big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) was related to estimated water deficit, using the SoilWat2 model and data from >600 plots located in previously burned areas in the western United States. Water deficit was characterized by: 1) the standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI), a coarse-scale drought index, and 2) the number of days with wet and warm conditions in the near-surface soil, where seeds and seedlings germinate and emerge (i.e. days with 0-5 cm deep soil water potential > -2.5 MPa and temperature above 0 °C). SPEI, a widely used drought index, was not predictive of whether sagebrush had reestablished. In contrast, wet-warm days elicited a critical drought threshold response, with successfully reestablished sites having experienced 7 more wet-warm days than unsuccessful sites during the first March following summer wildfire and restoration. Thus, seemingly small-scale and short-term changes in water availability and temperature can contribute to major ecosystem shifts, as many of these sites remained shrubless two decades later. These findings help clarify the definition of ecological drought for a foundational species and its imperiled semi-arid ecosystem. Drought is well known to affect the occurrence of wildfires, but drought in the year(s) after fire can determine whether fire causes long-lasting, negative impacts on ecosystems.

These data are 30m by 30 m grids of the mean Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) between 2001-2014 in the western United States. The SPEI index was developed by Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano and coauthors (https://spei.csic.es/index.html). Source evapotranspiration and precipitation data were generated by gridMET (http://www.climatologylab.org/gridmet.html).

The goal of Climate Futures Toolbox is to provide easy climate data access (MACA v2) to support climate scenario planning. This package allows you to: Quickly acquire climate data subsets for a spatial region of interest Summarize climate data at daily timesteps, and compute derived quantities Contrast reference and target time periods to understand differences in climate over time, and Easily work with climate data, without having to worry about the details of how it is stored or formatted

With support from the USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI), researchers at the North Central CASC will develop and implement an efficient and robust “Climate Scenarios Toolbox” to help on-the-ground management partners access and interpret relevant climate data, assess resource vulnerabilities to climate variability and change, and design adaptation strategies.

Federal land managers need an adaptive management framework to accommodate changing conditions and that allows them to effectively link the appropriate science to natural resource management decision-making across jurisdictional boundaries. FRAME-SIMPPLLE is a collaborative modeling process designed to accomplish this goal by coupling the adaptive capabilities of the SIMPPLLE modeling system with accepted principles of collaboration. The two essential components of the process are FRAME (Framing Research in support of the Adaptive Management of Ecosystems), which creates a collaborative problem-solving environment, and SIMPPLLE (SIMulating Patterns and Processes at Landscape Scales), which is a vegetation dynamics modeling system. The resulting collaborative modeling process allows decision makers to optimize the management of multiple resources and evaluate the likely outcome of various choices. The approach involves collaboratively engaging resource managers, modelers, and scientists in framing the science issues embedded in key natural resource management issues and then developing the SIMPPLLE modeling approach to address those issues. Through a prototype collaborative modeling effort at Mesa Verde National Park, a process has been developed for adaptive, multi-objective resource management. What is needed now is an effort to refine the approach and establish a transportable methodology that is applicable across a wide range of ecosystems. In the Northern Rockies, managers have expressed an interest in exploring this approach at Glacier National Park, the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, and the Rocky Mountain Front. This project utilized and evaluated the FRAME-SIMPPLLE approach to (1) explore adaptive management for climate and landscape change in the Northern Rockies, (2) recommend how to foster the long-term development of such collaborative planning tools as a joint effort between the USGS and the Institute of the Environment; (3) develop graduate student mentoring opportunities focused on collaborative planning and adaptive management science, and (4) investigate the use of GIS to further landscape science and conservation, especially related to energy development.

The North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) involved federal, state, tribal, and university partners to implement a pilot study aimed at developing data and information exchange protocols and identifying analytical needs across a broad network of partners. The study was organized around a set of management questions identified by the NC CSC’s partners. Issues related to species, landscapes, and ecosystem connections were used to orient the study across various scales of decision-making.   As part of the study, researchers prototyped the use of climate projections in ecosystem, habitat, and wildlife impact models, to inform resource management and planning decisions. Capabilities and constraints associated with information exchange and analysis between federal and non-federal partners were then assessed.   This study resulted in the development of an innovative platform geared towards user-friendly information exchange and analysis, providing new views of data critical to supporting researchers and decision-makers in analyzing climate-associated risk events and mitigating their effects.    

Colorado State University organized and hosted a workshop aimed at developing an information technology framework for data integration related to climate change impacts on ecosystems and landscape conservation. The workshop included key federal and state agency partners, tribal governments, and universities. The objective of the workshop was to develop an information technology strategy to handle the various data, information, and computational services which the eight regional DOI Climate Science Centers will be responsible for delivering to stakeholders.   Issues covered during the workshop included distributed computing and data storage; information security issues across federal, state, university, and public portals; analysis across multiple scales and sectors; and exchanging information to multiple user communities. The workshop was charged with developing a framework that could serve the needs of the regional Climate Science Centers, which include local to regional, cross-regional, and national level considerations. The workshop also provided guidance for a pilot study focused on evaluating the current and future capacity to analyze, archive, and distribute information across various information technology infrastructure types.