Determining which species, habitats, or ecosystems are most vulnerable to climate change enables resource managers to better set priorities for conservation action. To address the need for information on vulnerability, this research project aimed to leverage the expertise of university partners to inform the North Central Climate Science Center on how to best assess the vulnerability of elements of biodiversity to climate and land use change in order to inform the development and implementation of management options. Outcomes from this activity were expected to include 1) a framework for modeling vegetation type and species response to climate and land use change, 2) an evaluation of existing alternative vegetation and species response models, and 3) a presentation of vulnerability assessments for managers for incorporation into climate adaptation strategies.

Managers already face uncertainty when making decisions about how to best manage natural resources. Now, climate change is adding an additional level of complexity to resource management decisions. Understanding the ability of human and ecological communities to adapt to changing conditions (known as their adaptive capacity) is an integral component of effective management planning in the face of climate change. So too is identifying ways in which managers can better incorporate information on climate and the vulnerability of resources into their decision-making.   This project sought to improve decision-making in the North Central region by developing an approach to managing natural resources that acknowledges the uncertainties that exist and incorporates the adaptive capacity and vulnerability of resources to climate change. To meet this goal, researchers assessed (1) the key factors that affect the ability of human and ecological communities to adapt to climate change; (2) the current vulnerability of communities to changing conditions; and (3) the current risk assessment methodologies being used by managers in the region. The results of this project can help improve natural resource management decisions under changing climate conditions.

In response to the potential impacts of climate and land use change to the Nation’s ecosystems, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) launched a series of Rapid Ecoregional Assessments (REAs) in 2010. The REAs are focused on improving our understanding of the current state of ecosystems and how conditions may be impacted by changes in climate, land use, and other stressors.   Researchers with the North Central CSC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provided climate science support to the Wyoming Basin REA. The Wyoming Basin REA is a landscape-scale ecological assessment of over 33 million acres in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. This region has some of the highest quality wildlife habitat in the Intermountain West, and supports some of the largest U.S. populations of game species, including pronghorn, mule deer, elk, and bighorn sheep. The primary goal of the assessment was to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities of the region’s ecosystems and wildlife to change, to support management decision-making.   The climate analysis found that by 2030, temperatures in the region may rise by 2.5° Fahrenheit, and there will be more extreme hot days and fewer extreme cold days. It’s also expected that the snow accumulation season will start later in the fall, and that changing precipitation patterns will result in wetter winters and drier summers.   The results of this assessment can be used to identify priority areas for conservation or restoration of native plant and animal communities in the region, as well as to support broader landscape-scale decision-making related to all resources and public land uses.  

A central goal of the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) is to bring together the latest data, tools, and knowledge on the impacts of climate change to the hands of the region’s natural and cultural resource managers. To meet this goal, the NC CSC implemented three sub-projects which (1) organized a workshop aimed at developing an information technology framework for data integration related to climate change impacts on ecosystems and landscape conservation; (2) evaluated data and information exchange protocols and identified analytical needs; and (3) coordinated an assessment of the impacts of climate change across the Great Plains region, which contributed to the identification of potential adaptation strategies to deal with these effects.

The effects of climate change on the natural resources protected by Parks will likely be substantial, but geographically variable, due to local variation in climate trajectories and differences among ecosystems in their vulnerability to climate change. The projections of general circulation models (GCMs) indicate the possible magnitude and direction of future climate change for a region, but the utility of these projections for more local scales, those of individual National Park Service (NPS) units, are more uncertain because the coarse-scale GCMs lack much of the topographic detail that alters local climates. In addition, complex, interacting effects of temperature, precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, fire, and herbivores on the vegetation that is the foundational natural resource of many NPS units present challenges in assessing the effects of projected future climates on plant and animal assemblages managed by the NPS. In spring 2009, Wind Cave National Park (WICA) served as a case study in a workshop assessing the use of scenario planning as a tool for park management planning in the face of rapidly changing climate. One outcome of the workshop was the recognized need for quantitative models to better understand the range of possible vegetation changes under different future climates and management decisions. This report addresses this need; it describes our adaptation of a dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM) to WICA vegetation and the resulting projections of future vegetation under three future climate scenarios and 11 management scenarios determined by Park natural resource managers. Wind Cave National Park lies along a narrow transition zone between the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests of the Black Hills and the mixed grass prairie that once extended with few interruptions over the lower, gentler terrain, subject to warmer, drier climate to the east and south of the Park. The location and character of this transition is strongly influenced by fire frequency and intensity (Brown and Sieg 1999). Furthermore, the mixed grass prairie occupies a broader transition zone between eastern tallgrass prairie and the shortgrass prairie of the western Great Plains. The dominance of species characteristic of these two prairie types varies with soil moisture availability, evaporative demand, and recent grazing history (Cogan et al. 1999). In addition, Wind Cave lies near the midpoint of a long gradient of C3 (cool season) grass dominance to the north and C4 (warm season) grass dominance to the south. The ecotonal position of WICA may make it particularly sensitive to climate change. For example, small changes in fire frequency and/or intensity and the vigor of trees vs. grass could dramatically shift the proportions of these two lifeforms. The Park hydrology is also sensitive to changes in the balance between infiltration of precipitation and evapotranspiration, as on average, only a small fraction of annual precipitation reaches the deeper soil layers that feed permanent streamflow. The resources at risk at Wind Cave NP include the Cave itself, as well as small backcountry caves, a genetically important bison herd, and other prairie species including the black-tailed prairie dog and endangered black-footed ferrets. All of these resources will be directly affected by climate change impacts on vegetation and hydrology. Natural resource management challenges at WICA are substantial, diverse, and intertwined. Aboveground, the park has been recognized as exemplary for its high quality vegetation (Marriot et al. 1999), though the park is relatively small for the diversity of vegetation types and species that it supports. Even without a changing climate, maintaining the integrity of the plant communities is complicated by the park’s legislated responsibility to maintain viable populations of bison, elk and pronghorn. In addition, the federally endangered black-footed ferret was recently re-introduced to the park. This species requires large extents of prairie dog towns for prey and habitat. Prairie dogs impact vegetation by constant clipping, grazing and soil disturbance, thereby affecting plant composition and productivity. Moreover, naturally high interannual climate variability and the strong influence of precipitation on grass productivity in this region combine to yield high interannual variability in the amount of forage available for the wildlife that the park is tasked to maintain. Finally, fire, which is now primarily controlled by WICA and NPS Northern Great Plains fire management programs, is intertwined with all other natural resource issues at WICA, as it can impact prairie dog colony and forest expansion, ungulate foraging behavior, invasive plant species, and hydrological processes. Although not capable of capturing all of these complexities, dynamic vegetation models do provide a means for quantitatively projecting vegetation futures in future climates under plausible fire and grazing regimes. Our work uses the DGVM MC1 to simulate the effects of future climate projections and management practices on the vegetation of WICA. MC1 is designed to project potential vegetation as influenced by natural processes and hence is appropriate for national parks, where conservation of native biota and ecosystems is of great importance. Since the initial application of MC1 to a small portion of WICA (Bachelet et al. 2000), the model has been altered to improve model performance with the inclusion of dynamic fire. Applying this improved version to WICA required substantial recalibration, during which we have made a number of improvements to MC1 that will be incorporated as permanent changes. In this report we document these changes and our calibration procedure following a brief overview of the model. We compare the projections of current vegetation to the current state of the park and present projections of vegetation dynamics under future climates downscaled from three GCMs selected to represent the existing range in available GCM projections. In doing so, we examine the consequences of different management options regarding fire and grazing, major aspects of biotic management at Wind Cave.

Hydrologic models are used throughout the world to forecast and simulate streamflow, inform water management, municipal planning, and ecosystem conservation, and investigate potential effects of climate and land-use change on hydrology. The USGS Modeling of Watershed Systems (MoWS) group is currently developing the infrastructure for a National Hydrologic Model (NHM) to support coordinated, comprehensive, and consistent hydrologic model development and application. The NHM is expected to provide internally consistent estimates of total water availability, water sources, and streamflow timing, and measures of uncertainty around these estimates, for the entire United States. VisTrails, a scientific workflow and provenance management system (www.vistrails.org), could be used to facilitate consistent, organized, reproducible data management, analysis, and visualization for the NHM. A VisTrails system for the USGS Monthly Water Balance model (MWB) and/or the USGS Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) would be widely used in the NHM effort as well as by numerous agencies and researchers for individual model applications. Project Researchers worked with North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) staff to develop a VisTrails system for MWB, as a first step in developing a more complex VisTrails system for PRMS. The resulting VisTrails system for MWB has facilitated consistent, organized, and reproducible model calibration and simulations for monthly streamflow projections by research hydrologists and managers nationwide.

The goal of this project was to inform implementation of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC) Whitebark Pine (WBP) subcommittee’s “WBP Strategy” based on climate science and ecological forecasting. Project objectives were to: 1. Forecast ecosystem processes and WBP habitat suitability across the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) under alternative IPCC future scenarios; 2. Improve understanding of possible response to future climate by analyzing WBP/climate relationships in past millennia; 3. Develop WBP management alternatives; 4. Evaluate the alternatives under IPCC future scenarios in terms of WBP goals, ecosystem services, and costs of implementation; and 5. Draw recommendations for implementation of the GYCC WBP strategy that consider uncertainty. Recommendations were derived in a scenario planning workshop based on both the results and uncertainty in the results. These recommendations are expected to thus be immediately acted upon by the GYA management community and the approach and methods are readily applicable to the several other tree species that are undergoing die-offs under changing climate. 

The Prairie Pothole Region spans parts of North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Iowa and south-central Canada and contains millions of wetlands that provide habitat for breeding and migrating birds. Because it is the continent’s most important breeding area for waterfowl, conservation and management largely focuses on protecting habitat for nesting ducks. However, other wetland-dependent birds also rely on this region, and it is important to understand the degree to which habitat conserved for ducks provides habitat for other species, and how the quality of this habitat will be affected by climate change. Project researchers tested whether waterfowl are effective representatives, or surrogates, for other wetland-dependent birds by predicting how climate change will affect habitat suitability for waterfowl and other species. The team also considered how climate change is likely to affect land-use patterns and agricultural conversion risk, and used these predictions to identify areas of the landscape where both waterfowl and other species were expected to have suitable habitat in the future. This research was intended to help managers efficiently direct their resources towards conserving areas that will provide habitat to a broad suite of species.

Southwestern Colorado is already experiencing the effects of climate change in the form of larger and more severe wildfires, prolonged drought, and earlier snowmelt. Climate scientists expect the region to experience more summer heat waves, longer-lasting and more frequent droughts, and decreased river flow in the future. These changes will ultimately impact local communities and challenge natural resource managers in allocating water under unpredictable drought conditions, preserving forests in the face of changing fire regimes, and managing threatened species under shifting ecological conditions.   In light of the wide-ranging potential impacts of climate change in the region, this project sought to help decision-makers develop strategies to reduce climate change impacts on people and nature. Scientists, land managers, and local communities worked together to identify actions that can be taken to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Known as “adaptation strategies”, these actions are an essential component of effective planning under shifting climate conditions. To facilitate the planning process, researchers aimed to provide information on the vulnerability of ecosystems, model plausible future climate conditions, and identify the social contexts in which adaptation decisions are made.   The project focused on the San Juan and upper Gunnison river basins of southwestern Colorado, though the goal was to develop an adaptation toolkit that can be applied to other landscapes. By identifying appropriate adaptation actions, this project was designed to help improve the resilience of local communities and ecosystems in the face of an uncertain future. Learn more about how this project is progressing in its second phase: Building Social and Ecological Resilience to Climate Change in Southwestern Colorado: Phase 2

Through its Foundational Science Area (FSA) activities, the North Central Climate Science Center (CSC) aims to provide relevant and usable climate information to decision-makers and natural resource managers, so that they can better manage their natural and cultural resources under climate change. Research to meet this objective was implemented in 2013 through three FSAs: (1) Understanding and quantifying drivers of regional climate changes; (2) connecting climate drivers to management targets; and (3) characterizing adaptive capacity of stakeholder communities and informing management options. FSA 1 focused on developing targeted climate information for the North Central region, such as changes in air temperature and evapotranspiration. Through FSA 2, this climate data was used to help resource managers identify the vulnerability of conservation targets, such as particular plant or animal populations, to changing conditions. Finally, FSA 3 focused on identifying how various climate changes have already affected management practices, with the goal of understanding the ability of managers to implement adaptation and mitigation strategies in repsonse to changing conditions.   These areas of research contribute to the development of a coordinated and integrated approach to the management of the North Central region’s natural and cultural resources, utilizing the best possible understanding of past, present, and future climate. The knowledge gained from this research was also used by the North Central CSC to provide expertise and consultation on the services and tools being developed by the CSC, to ensure that the CSC’s research and tools are both relevant and useable to resource managers throughout the region.