Ecological transformations are occurring as a result of climate change, challenging traditional approaches to land management decision-making. The resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework helps managers consider how to respond to this challenge. We…

Piñon–juniper (PJ) woodlands are a dominant community type across the Intermountain West, comprising over a million acres and experiencing critical effects from increasing wildfire. Large PJ mortality and regeneration failure after catastrophic…

Identifying areas expected to remain buffered from climate change and maintain biodiversity and ecological function (i.e., climate refugia) is important for climate adaptation planning. As structurally diverse transitional zones between…

Under climate change, ecosystems are experiencing novel drought regimes, often in combination with stressors that reduce resilience and amplify drought’s impacts. Consequently, drought appears increasingly likely to push systems beyond important…

The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of…

To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the…

Abstract (from ESA Journals): Climate change is a well-documented driver and threat multiplier of infectious disease in wildlife populations. However, wildlife disease management and climate-change adaptation have largely operated in isolation.…

Climate change is altering fire regimes and post-fire conditions, contributing to relatively rapid transformation of landscapes across the western US. Studies are increasingly documenting post-fire vegetation transitions, particularly from forest…

Soil moisture is crucial for agriculture and hydrology, but its accurate prediction is challenging due to inadequate representation of various complex land surface processes and meteorological influences. In this research, we employ the Long…

The operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEBop) model has been utilized to generate gridded evapotranspiration data from Landsat images. These estimates are primarily driven by two sources of information: reference evapotranspiration…

Phenology detection from remotely sensed data remains challenging in semi-arid ecosystems due to the unique spatial heterogeneity and irregular temporal growth in plants. PlanetScope imagery, with fine spatial and temporal resolutions, is…

Fire suppression is the primary management response to wildfires in many areas globally. By removing less-extreme wildfires, this approach ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions. Here, we term this the “suppression…

Simulation models are valuable tools for estimating ecosystem response to environmental conditions and are particularly relevant for investigating climate change impacts. However, because of high computational requirements, models are often…

An estimated 50–80% of North America’s ducks use the millions of wetland basins in the Prairie Pothole Region as breeding habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) National Wildlife Refuge System has conserved approximately 1.3 million…

Fire plays a critical role in forests of the western United States (US), but as wildfire and climate deviate from historical patterns, increasing fire activity may significantly alter forest ecosystems. To understand the impacts of changing…

This report presents climate change-informed resource stewardship strategies for diverse Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve natural and cultural resources. The strategies were developed in early 2022 by park staff and other subject-…

Remotely sensed evapotranspiration (ET) data offer strong potential to support data-driven approaches for sustainable water management. However, practitioners require robust and rigorous accuracy assessments of such data. The OpenET system, which…

Accurate models are important to predict how global climate change will continue to alter plant phenology and near-term ecological forecasts can be used to iteratively improve models and evaluate predictions that are made a…

Grassland birds in North America have declined sharply over the last 60 years, driven by the widespread loss and degradation of grassland habitats. Climate change is occurring more rapidly in grasslands relative to some other ecosystems…

As climate change facilitates significant and persistent ecological transformations, managing ecosystems according to historical baseline conditions may no longer be feasible. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework can guide climate-informed…

The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using proactive forest management (e.g. forest thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning) to mitigate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests. To…

Managing resources under climate change is a high-stakes and daunting task, especially because climate change and associated complex biophysical responses engender sustained directional changes as well as abrupt transformations. This…

Over the last twenty years, phenology—the study of seasonal life cycle events—has emerged as a key subfield of global change biology. Phenology provides an integrated measure of the organismal response to climate change and is a key driver of the…

Land surface phenology (LSP) products are currently of large uncertainties due to cloud contaminations and other impacts in temporal satellite observations and they have been poorly validated because of the lack of spatially comparable ground…

In this work we find that the future of fire in the U.S. will likely be characterized by more frequent and larger fires in most regions due to the changing climate and more people starting fires in new places. For the period 2020-2060, we project…

Forest ecosystems play a major role in sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide, which can help offset the detrimental effects of anthropogenic carbon emissions. However, climate change has and will continue to affect the phenology of forest…

Accurate characterization of plant phenology is of great importance for monitoring global carbon, water, and energy cycling. Remotely sensed satellite observations have been widely used to estimate land surface phenology across multiple spatial…

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is increasingly involved in the contemporary management of natural resources. Tribal wildlife management programs in the United States may be uniquely positioned to effectively and ethically integrate their IK. While a…

Successful conservation of ecosystems in a changing climate requires actionable research that directly supports the rethinking and revising of management approaches to address changing risks and opportunities. As an important first step toward…

Spring phenology of temperate ecosystems is highly sensitive to climate change, generating various impacts on many important terrestrial surface biophysical processes. Although various prognostic models relying…

Loss and degradation of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) rangelands due to an accelerated invasive annual grass-wildfire cycle and other stressors are significant management, conservation, and economic issues in the western U.S. These…

Pinyon–juniper (PJ) woodlands are an important component of dryland ecosystems across the US West and are potentially susceptible to ecological transformation. However, predicting woodland futures is complicated by species-specific strategies for…

Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change…

Grasslands in the Great Plains are of ecological, economic, and cultural importance in the United States. In response to a need to understand how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st…

Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems is crucial for successful grassland management in the 21st century. In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS NC…

Forests in the western US are increasingly impacted by climate change. Warm, dry conditions associated with climate change both increases fire activity in western forests and make it more difficult for forests to recover after wildfires. If…

Wildfires and housing development have increased since the 1990s, presenting unique challenges for wildfire management. However, it is unclear how the relative influences of housing growth and changing wildfire occurrence have altered risk to…

Wildfire occurrence varies among regions and through time due to the long-term impacts of climate on fuel structure and short-term impacts on fuel flammability. Identifying the climatic conditions that trigger extensive fire years at regional…

This project combined tree-ring based paleo and modern climate and hydrologic research aimed at understanding the primary influences on drought risk and water reliability in basins critical for western U.S. water resources. New paleohydrologic…

Macrosystem-scale research is supported by many ecological networks of people, infrastructure, and data. However, no network is sufficient to address all macrosystems ecology research questions, and there is much to be gained by conducting…

It is a critical time to reflect on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) science to date as well as envision what research can be done right now with NEON (and other) data and what training is needed to enable a diverse user…

Soil temperature and moisture (soil-climate) affect plant growth and microbial metabolism, providing a mechanistic link between climate and growing conditions. However, spatially explicit soil-climate estimates that can inform management and…

Tribal nations and Indigenous communities are key collaborators on adaptation work within the Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) network. The centers have partnered with numerous Tribal and Indigenous communities on projects or activities…

This guide is intended to provide managers, decision makers, and other practitioners with advice on conducting a rapid assessment of the social dimensions of drought. Findings from a rapid assessment can provide key social context that may aid in…

We developed a framework to estimate high-resolution spatiotemporal soil moisture (monthly, annual, and seasonal) and temperature-moisture regimes. Our approach uses the Newhall simulation model (NSM) which we fully describe in the Larger…

To cope with complex environmental impacts in a changing climate, researchers are increasingly being asked to produce science that can directly support policy and decision making. To achieve such societal impact, scientists are using climate…

Developing scientific information that is used in policy and practice has been a longstanding challenge in many sectors and disciplines, including climate change adaptation for natural resource management. One approach to address this problem…

The sagebrush ecosystem is home to diverse wildlife, including charismatic species such as pronghorn, pygmy rabbits, mule deer and Greater Sage-Grouse. Historic and contemporary land-uses, large wildfires, non-native (introduced) plant invasions…

Climate change is expected to alter the distribution and abundance of tree species, impacting ecosystem structure and function. Yet, anticipating where this will occur is often hampered by a lack of understanding of how demographic rates, most…

Vegetation phenology is one of the most sensitive indicators to environmental and climate changes. In order to characterize the seasonal variation in relatively pure or homogenous vegetation types, fine spatial resolution…

Climate change is expected to disproportionately affect species occupying ecosystems with relatively hard boundaries, such as alpine ecosystems. Wildlife managers must identify actions to conserve and manage alpine species into the future, while…

Increased wildfire activity combined with warm and dry post-fire conditions may undermine the mechanisms maintaining forest resilience to wildfires, potentially causing ecosystem transitions, or fire-catalyzed vegetation shifts. Stand-replacing…

State fish and wildlife agencies are required to submit a State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) every 10 years to be eligible for grants through the State Wildlife Grant Program. With the next round of revisions due in 2025, the U.S. Geological…

Macroecology research seeks to understand ecological phenomena with causes and consequences that accumulate, interact, and emerge across scales spanning several orders of magnitude. Broad-extent, fine-grain information (i.e., high spatial…

This study investigates optimal grassland easement acquisition strategies with a focus on the roles of environmental benefit additionality and spatial spillover effect of grassland conversion. Numerical analysis shows that the optimal solution…

Over time, the idea of the public value of federally funded science has slowly transitioned from basic science that helps fight disease and maintain national security (Bush 1945) to use-inspired science that directly informs decisions about the…

Aim

Anticipating when and where changes in species' demographic rates will lead to range shifts in response to changing climate remains a major challenge. Despite evidence of increasing mortality in dry forests across the globe in…

Despite striking global change, management to ensure healthy landscapes and sustained natural resources has tended to set objectives on the basis of the historical range of variability in stationary ecosystems. Many social–ecological systems are…

Biological invasions represent an important and unique case of ecological transformation that can strongly influence species and entire ecosystems. Challenges in managing invasions arise on multiple fronts, ranging from diverse and often…

Accurate predictions of ecological restoration outcomes are needed across the increasingly large landscapes requiring treatment following disturbances. However, observational studies often fail to account for nonrandom treatment application,…

The combination of continuing anthropogenic impact on ecosystems across the globe and the observation of catastrophic shifts in some systems has generated substantial interest in understanding and predicting ecological tipping points. The recent…

The Milk and St. Mary Rivers are international waterways straddling the United States and Canada and traversing four Tribal Nations before draining into the Missouri and South Saskatchewan Rivers respectively. Management of water resources in the…

This "In Brief" article describes the use of scenario planning to facilitate climate change adaptation in the National Park Service. It summarizes best practices and innovations for using climate change scenario planning, with an…

Interannual variation, especially weather, is an often-cited reason for restoration “failures”; yet its importance is difficult to experimentally isolate across broad spatiotemporal extents, due to correlations between weather and site…

The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in nearly 100 parks, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management…

Ungulate populations across the West have adapted to specific patterns in forage quantity, quality, and timing that ultimately influence the number of animals. We assessed potential for climate change to affect forage quality and availability for…

Recent fires have fueled concerns that regional and global warming trends are leading to more extreme burning. We found compelling evidence that average fire events in regions of the United States are up to four times the size, triple the…

Trees are bioindicators of global climate change and regional urbanization, but available monitoring tools are ineffective for fine-scale observation of many species. Using six accelerometers mounted on two urban ash trees (Fraxinus americana),…

This project investigated how climate change over the last 21,000 years, which was characterized by significant warming, influenced vegetation in the Southern and Middle Rockies. We found that rapid vegetation change was initiated across these…

These model objects are the outputs of two Bayesian hierarchical models (one for the Middle Rockies and one for the Southern Rockies) to explore the role of landscape characteristics in climate-driven ecological change and transformation. We used…

These model objects are the outputs of three Boosted Regression Tree models (for three different time periods) to explore the role of climate change and variability in driving ecological change and transformation. Response variables were the…

Novel approaches for quantifying density and distributions could help biologists adaptively manage wildlife populations, particularly if methods are accurate, consistent, cost-effective, rapid, and sensitive to change. Such approaches may also…

Beaver mimicry is a fast-growing conservation technique to restore streams and manage water that is gaining popularity within the natural resource management community because of a wide variety of claimed socio-environmental benefits. Despite a…

In the Great Plains, playas are critical wetland habitats for migratory birds and a source of recharge for the agriculturally important High Plains aquifer. The temporary wetlands exhibit complex hydrology, filling rapidly via local rain storms…

We develop an analytical framework to examine an agency's optimal grassland easement acquisition while accounting for landowners’ optimal decisions under uncertainty in both conversion and conservation returns. We derive the value of “wait…

Drought-induced tree mortality is predicted to increase in dry forests across the globe as future projections show hotter, drier climates. This could potentially result in large-scale tree die-offs, changes in species composition, and loss of…

Remote sensing of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) provides a powerful proxy for gross primary productivity (GPP). It is particularly promising in boreal ecosystems where seasonal downregulation of photosynthesis occurs without…

How robust is our assessment of impacts to ecosystems and species from a rapidly changing climate during the 21st century? We examine the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and constraints …

The impacts of climate change (CC) on natural and cultural resources are far-reaching and complex. A major challenge facing resource managers is not knowing the exact timing and nature of those impacts. To confront this problem, scientists,…

The design of this survey protocol is based on the indicator framework presented in Wall et. al (2017 https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0008.1) and is intended to evaluate projects…

The future of dry forests around the world is uncertain given predictions that rising temperatures and enhanced aridity will increase drought-induced tree mortality. Using forest management and ecological restoration to reduce density and…

The lack of consistent, accurate information on evapotranspiration (ET) and consumptive use of water by irrigated agriculture is one of the most important data gaps for water managers in the western United States (U.S.) and other arid…

Scholars have identified a ‘usability gap’ between science and its ability to inform real-world decisions as well as a range of factors that facilitate or impede attempts to span the usability gap with information products. However, most…

Most environmental data come from a minority of well-monitored sites. An ongoing challenge in the environmental sciences is transferring knowledge from monitored sites to unmonitored sites. Here, we demonstrate a novel transfer-learning framework…

Abstract (from Bioscience): Biodiversity projections with uncertainty estimates under different climate, land-use, and policy scenarios are essential to setting and achieving international targets to mitigate biodiversity loss. Evaluating and…

Ecological transformation creates many challenges for public natural resource management and requires managers to grapple with new relationships to change and new ways to manage it. In the context of unfamiliar trajectories of ecological change,…

Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing…

Natural resource managers worldwide face a growing challenge: Intensifying global change increasingly propels ecosystems toward irreversible ecological transformations. This nonstationarity challenges traditional conservation goals and human well…

Droughts are disproportionately impacting global dryland regions where ecosystem health and function are tightly coupled to moisture availability. Drought severity is commonly estimated using algorithms such as the standardized precipitation-…

Context

Agent-based models (ABMs) and state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) have proven useful for understanding processes underlying social-ecological systems and evaluating practical questions about how systems might respond to…

Natural and cultural resource managers are increasingly working with the scientific community to create information on how best to adapt to the current and projected impacts of climate change. Engaging with these managers is a strategy that…

Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate…

Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life-cycle stages which can be observed across spatial and temporal scales that span orders of magnitude (e.g., organisms to landscapes). The variety of scales at which phenological…

Land cover change plays a critical role in influencing hydrological responses. Change in land cover has impacted runoff across basins with substantial human interference; however, the impacts in basins with minimal human interference have been…

A robust method for characterizing the biophysical environment of terrestrial vegetation uses the relationship between Actual Evapotranspiration (AET) and Climatic Water Deficit (CWD). These variables are usually estimated from a water balance…

Plant community response to climate change will be influenced by individual plant responses that emerge from competition for limiting resources that fluctuate through time and vary across space. Projecting these responses requires an approach…

Phenology camera (PhenoCam) data and the derived green chromatic coordinate (GCC) time series are commonly used to track seasonal changes in canopy greenness. However, the GCC time series is noisy because color distortion commonly exists in the…

Regeneration is an essential demographic step that affects plant population persistence, recovery after disturbances, and potential migration to track suitable climate conditions. Challenges of restoring big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) after…

Grasslands, and the depressional wetlands that exist throughout them, are endangered ecosystems that face both climate and land-use change pressures. Tens of millions of dollars are invested annually to manage the existing fragments of these…

Drought is an inescapable reality in many regions, including much of the western United States. With climate change, droughts are predicted to intensify and occur more frequently, making the imperative for drought management …

Near-surface remote sensing has been used to document seasonal growth patterns (i.e. phenology) for plant communities in diverse habitats. Phenology from this source may only apply to the area within the images. Meanwhile ecosystem models can…

This report explains scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool in general, then describes how it was applied to Wind Cave National Park as the second part of a pilot project to dovetail climate change scenario planning with National…

To characterize eruption activity of the iconic Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park over past centuries, we obtained 41 new radiocarbon dates of mineralized wood preserved in the mound of silica that precipitated from erupted waters…

The Great Plains Grassland Summit: Challenges and Opportunities from North to South was held April 10-11, 2018 in Denver, Colorado to provide syntheses of information about key grassland topics of interest in the Great Plains; networking and…

Scenario planning is a useful tool for identifying key vulnerabilities of ecological systems to changing climates, informed by the potential outcomes for a set of divergent, plausible, and relevant climate scenarios. We evaluated potential…

This paper describes the motivation for the creation of the Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board for the Sixth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), its initial activities, and its…

Evaporative demand (E0) both drives and responds to droughts based on interactions across the land surface-atmosphere interface, and can be exploited to signal agricultural, hydrologic, and ecological droughts. In this chapter, we argue that…

Grassland loss has been extensive worldwide, endangering the associated biodiversity and human well-being that are both dependent on these ecosystems. Ecologists have developed approaches to restore grassland communities and many have been…

The chapters of this book have delved into the timely and important topic of science and management of wildland ecosystems in the face of climate and land use change. The period of the book’s development (2011–2015) was one of rapid advancement…

Most nations around the world set aside some lands from where people live and work for the benefit of nature. Wildland ecosystems are those lands occupied chiefly by native plants and animals, not intensively used as urban or residential areas,…

Since the passage of the U.S Global Change Research Act of 1990, several actions have been carried out in the Great Plains, including development of the first Great Plains regional climate assessment (National Climate Assessment Synthesis Team…

We used long-term observations of grassland aboveground net plant production (ANPP, 1939– 2016), growing seasonal advanced very-high-resolution radiometer remote sensing normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data (1982–2016), and…

The evaluation of historical water use in the Upper Rio Grande Basin (URGB), United States and Mexico, using Landsat-derived actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from 1986 to 2015 is presented here as the first study of its kind to apply satellite…

Understanding how different crops use water over time is essential for planning and managing water allocation, water rights, and agricultural production. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of crop…

In this research, we characterized the changes in the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) monthly total water storage anomaly (TWSA) in 18 surface basins and 12 principal aquifers in the conterminous United States during 2003–2016.…

Satellite-based actual evapotranspiration (ETa) is becoming increasingly reliable and available for various water management and agricultural applications from water budget studies to crop performance monitoring. The Operational Simplified…

Upper Klamath Lake (UKL) is the source of the Klamath River that flows through southern Oregon and northern California. The UKL Basin provides water for 81,000+ ha (200,000+ acres) of irrigation on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Klamath Project…

Reliable information on water use and availability at basin and field scales are important to ensure the optimized constructive uses of available water resources. This study was conducted with the specific objective to estimate Landsat-based…

The Great Plains region plays an important role in providing water and land resources and habitat for wildlife and livestock, crops, energy production, and other critical ecosystem services to support rural livelihoods. The semiarid conditions of…

Background: The need for basic information on spatial distribution and abundance of plant species for research and management in semiarid ecosystems is frequently unmet. This need is particularly acute in the large areas impacted by megafires in…

Altered climate, including weather extremes, can cause major shifts in vegetative recovery after disturbances. Predictive models that can identify the separate and combined temporal effects of disturbance and weather on plant communities and that…

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)…

The enemy release hypothesis proposes that invasion by exotic plant species is driven by their release from natural enemies (i.e. herbivores and pathogens) in their introduced ranges. However, in many cases, natural enemies, which may be…

Time and money for conservation are limited, so there is a need for responsible investments that embrace the realities of climate change. Droughts, floods, wildfires, hotter temperatures, declining snowpack, and changing streamflow are already…

The effects of changing climate and disturbance on mountain forest carbon (C) stocks vary with tree species distributions and over elevational gradients. Warming can not only increase C uptake by stimulating productivity at high elevations but…

Wildlife aggregation patterns can influence disease transmission. However, limited research evaluates the influence of anthropogenic and natural factors on aggregation. Many managers would like to reduce wildlife contact rates, driven by…

The Northern Great Plains (NGP) region plays a very important role in providing water and land resources and other critical ecosystem services to support rural livelihoods. Semi-arid conditions and the tight coupling of livelihood enterprises…

Accurate maps of the wildland–urban interface (WUI) are critical for the development of effective land management policies, conducting risk assessments, and the mitigation of wildfire risk. Most WUI maps identify areas at risk from wildfire by…

Rangelands and pastures include grasslands, savannas, shrublands, and woodlands and are often maintained to support grazing animals. Rangelands and pastures cover more than one-third of the land area in the USA and a similar extent globally. The…

Postfire shifts in vegetation composition will have broad ecological impacts. However, information characterizing postfire recovery patterns and their drivers are lacking over large spatial extents. In this analysis, we used Landsat imagery…

Accurate estimation of cropping intensity (CI), an indicator of food production, is well aligned with the ongoing efforts to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) under diminishing natural resources. The advancement in satellite remote…

Conversion of grassland to cropland in the US Prairie Pothole Region is of longstanding concern. The region's grasslands are carbon (C) sinks and provide important breeding grounds for many migratory bird species. Crop production requires…

In recent decades, Rocky Mountain accumulated snowpack levels have experienced rapid declines, yet long-term records of snowpack prior to the installation of snowpack observation stations in the early and mid 20th century are limited. To date, a…

Managers are increasingly being asked to integrate climate change adaptation into public land management. The literature discusses a range of adaptation approaches, including managing for resistance, resilience, and transformation; but many…

Vegetation phenology and productivity play a crucial role in surface energy balance, plant and animal distribution, and animal movement and habitat use and can be measured with remote sensing metrics including start of season (SOS), peak…

Climate change is expected to alter the distribution and abundance of tree species, impacting ecosystem structure and function. Yet, anticipating where this will occur is often hampered by a lack of understanding of how demographic rates, most…

Science communication scholarship claims that engagement, dialogue, and interaction are important communicative components. But there are relatively very few studies of dialogic science communication processes from a science communication…

Abstract (from British Ecological Society): As public land managers seek to adopt and implement conservation measures aimed at reversing or slowing the negative effects of climate change, they are looking to understand public opinion regarding…

This document is a companion to the Resource Stewardship Strategy Development Guide, developed in 2019. This document provides a guide to more thoroughly address climate change in resource stewardship strategies through scenario planning.…

One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. To help federal land managers address this need, the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC…

Abstract (from PNAS): Recent decades have seen droughts across multiple US river basins that are unprecedented over the last century and potentially longer. Understanding the drivers of drought in a long-term context requires extending…

Abstract (from DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln): Native American peoples of the Northern and Central Plains have long endured harsh climate conditions, such as floods and droughts, and they possess valuable…

Scientists gathered at a workshop in Cambridge, Mass., last June to identify opportunities and challenges associated with integrating multiscale, multiplatform streams of data to produce higher-level phenological data products (e.g., models) and…

Vegetation phenology controls the seasonality of many ecosystem processes, as well as numerous biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks. Phenology is also highly sensitive to climate change and variability. Here we present a series of datasets, together…

Near surface (i.e., camera) and satellite remote sensing metrics have become widely used indicators of plant growing seasons. While robust linkages have been established between field metrics and ecosystem exchange in many land cover types,…

Phenology is a valuable diagnostic of ecosystem health, and has applications to environmental monitoring and management. Here, we conduct an intercomparison analysis using phenological transition dates derived from near-surface PhenoCam imagery…

Observations of vegetation phenology at regional-to-global scales provide important information regarding seasonal variation in the fluxes of energy, carbon, and water between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Numerous algorithms have been…

Drylands account for approximately 40% of the global land surface and play a dominant role in the trend and variability of terrestrial carbon uptake and storage. Gross ecosystem photosynthesis – termed gross primary productivity (GPP) – is a…

Ground validation of satellite-based vegetation phenology has been challenging because ground phenology data are sparsely distributed and mostly observed from limited numbers of plant species at discrete phenophases. The recently developed…

Land surface phenology (LSP) has been widely used as the “footprint” of urbanization and global climate change. Shifts of LSP have cascading effects on food production, carbon sequestration, water consumption, biodiversity, and public health.…

Monitoring vegetation phenology is critical for quantifying climate change impacts on ecosystems. We present an extensive dataset of 1783 site-years of phenological data derived from PhenoCam network imagery from 393 digital cameras, situated…

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…

Dense time series of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 imagery are creating exciting new opportunities to monitor, map, and characterize temporal dynamics in land surface properties with unprecedented spatial detail and quality. By combining imagery from…

Abstract from SpringLink: Many western communities are surrounded by public lands that support land-based and local economies. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) decision-making affects the vulnerability of those land-based livelihoods, especially…

Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Vegetation phenology has received increasing attention in climate change research. Near-surface sensing using digital repeat photography has proven to be useful for ecosystem-scale monitoring of vegetation phenology…

Introduction (From Parks Stewardship Forum) Managers and scientists widely acknowledge climate change as one of the greatest threats to protected areas in the US and worldwide (Gross et al. 2016). The US National Park Service (NPS) began…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Globally, spring phenology and abiotic processes are shifting earlier with warming. Differences in the magnitudes of these shifts may decouple the timing of plant resource requirements from resource availability. In riparian forests across the…

Abstract (from Diversity and Distributions): 

Aim

Surrogate species can provide an efficient mechanism for biodiversity conservation if they encompass the needs or indicate the status of a broader set of species. When…

Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Dryland ecosystems play an important role in determining how precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon fluxes at regional to global scales. Thus, to understand how climate change may affect the…

Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution): Tallgrass prairie ecosystems in North America are heavily degraded and require effective restoration strategies if prairie specialist taxa are to be preserved. One common management tool used to…

Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities are found in western North America and comprise a mix of shrubs, forbs, and …

Abstract (from OxfordAcademic): The whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) tree species faces precipitously declining populations in many locations. It is a keystone species found primarily in high-elevation forests across the Western…

Abstract (from IOP Science): Global agriculture is challenged to increase soil carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse gas emissions while providing products for an increasing population. Growing crop production could be achieved through…

On the Western Slope of Colorado, variable climate and precipitation conditions are typical. Periods of drought—which may be defined by lack of water, high temperatures, low soil moisture, or other indicators—cause a range of impacts across…

The combination of climate change and altered disturbance regimes is directly and indirectly affecting plant communities by mediating competitive interactions, resulting in shifts in species composition and abundance. Dryland plant communities,…

State-and-Transition Simulation Modeling (STSM) is a quantitative analysis method that can consolidate a wide array of resource management issues under a “what-if” scenario exercise. STSM can be seen as an ensemble of models, such as climate…

Abstract from Ecosphere: The Prairie Pothole Region, situated in the northern Great Plains, provides important stopover habitat for migratory shorebirds. During spring migration in the U.S. Prairie Potholes, 7.3 million…

Certain vegetation types (e.g., deciduous shrubs, deciduous trees, grasslands) have distinct life cycles marked by the growth and senescence of leaves and periods of enhanced photosynthetic activity. Where these types exist, recurring changes in…

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key component of the hydrologic cycle, accounting for ~70% of precipitation in the conterminous U.S. (CONUS), but it has been a challenge to predict accurately across different spatio-temporal scales. The increasing…

Species distribution models (SDMs) are commonly used to assess potential climate change impacts on biodiversity, but several critical methodological decisions are often made arbitrarily. We compare variability arising from these decisions to the…

There is substantial literature on the importance of bridging across disciplinary and science–management boundaries. One of the ways commonly suggested to cross boundaries is for participants from both sides of the boundary to jointly produce…

Developing resource management strategies in the face of climate change is complicated by the considerable uncertainty associated with projections of climate and its impacts and by the complex interactions between social and ecological variables…

Scenario planning helps managers incorporate climate change into their natural resource decision making through a structured “what-if” process of identifying key uncertainties and potential impacts and responses. Although qualitative scenarios,…

Article for outlet: Plant Ecology. Abstract: Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities are widespread non-forested drylands in western North American and similar to all shrub steppe ecosystems world-wide are composed of a shrub…

There is a high demand for agrohydrologic models to use gridded near-surface air temperature data as the model input for estimating regional and global water budgets and cycles. The Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) developed by…

In an effort to increase conservation effectiveness through the use of Earth observation technologies, a group of remote sensing scientists affiliated with government and academic institutions and conservation organizations identified 10…

Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096317300153): In recent years, federal land management agencies in the United…

Most of the western United States is experiencing the effects of rapid and directional climate change (Garfin et al. 2013). These effects, along with forecasts of profound changes in the future, provide strong motivation for resource managers to…

Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0121.1): Much of the academic literature and policy discussions about sustainable…

Identifying the climatic drivers of an ecological system is a key step in assessing its vulnerability to climate change. The climatic dimensions to which a species or system is most sensitive – such as means or extremes – can guide methodological…

Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.017404… studies have projected increases in drought…

Analysis of the relationship between evapotranspiration (ET) and its natural and anthropogenic drivers is critical in water-limited basins such as the Nile. The spatiotemporal relationships of ET with rainfall and vegetation dynamics in the Nile…

In this study, we combined two actual evapotranspiration datasets (ET), one obtained from a root zone water balance model and another from an energy balance model, to partition annual ET into green (rainfall-based) and blue (surface/groundwater)…

Prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment and a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage, Great Plains Technical Input Report is the result of a collaboration among numerous local, state, federal, and…

Abstract (from http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789400775145): This volume offers a scientific assessment of the effects of climatic variability and change on forest resources…

Level 3 soil moisture datasets from the recently launched Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite are evaluated for drought monitoring in rangelands.Validation of SMAP soil moisture (SSM) with in situ and modeled estimates showed high level…

Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-014-0585-0): Drought is a part of the normal climate variability and the life and…

Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00027.1): The way in which people perceive climate change risk is informed by their social…

Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.012443… niche models predict plant responses to…

This report was submitted to the Colorado Energy Office in 2015 and was edited by Eric Gordon (University of Colorado Boulder) and Dennis Ojima (Colorado State University). It was based on a study that evaluated Colorado's…

Historical (1984-2014) Landsat-based ET maps were generated for Palo Verde Irrigation District (PVID) and eight other sub-basins in parts of Middle and Lower Central Valley, California. A total of 3,396 Landsat images were processed using the…

Chapter on Adaptation for the 2014 National Climate Assessment. Adaptation refers to action to prepare for and adjust to new conditions, thereby reducing harm or taking advantage of new opportunities. Adaptation planning is occurring in…

Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.1590/full): Ecohydrological responses to climate change will exhibit spatial variability and…

Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/15-1061/abstract): Weather and climate affect many ecological processes, making spatially…

Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014000065): Climate change impacts threaten existing development efforts…

Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-15-0042.1): Drought is a natural part of the historical climate variability in the northern…

Climate policy developers and natural resource managers frequently desire high-resolution climate data to prepare for future effects of climate change. But they face a long-standing problem: the vast majority of climate models have been run at…

The United States Northern Great Plains (NGP) has a high potential for landscape-scale conservation, but this grassland landscape is threatened by encroachment of woody species. We surveyed NGP land managers to identify patterns in, and…

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) ecosystems provide habitat for sagebrush-obligate wildlife species such as the Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). The understory of big sagebrush plant communities is composed of grasses…

Ecological abundance data are often recorded on an ordinal scale in which the lowest

category represents species absence. One common example is when plant species cover

is visually assessedwithin bounded quadrats and then assigned to…

Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-15-0276.1): Remotely sensed land skin temperature (LST) is increasingly being used to…

The potential influence of seed bank composition on range shifts of species due to climate change is unclear. Seed banks can provide a means of both species persistence in an area and local range expansion in the case of increasing habitat…

Abstract (from http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/agsaaea16/235895.htm): We evaluate the regional-level agricultural impacts of climate change in the Northern…

An increase in land conversion from grassland to cropland in the United States has attracted attention in recent years. According to Claassen et al. (2011a), grassland to cropland conversion is concentrated in the Northern Plains, including…

The Scaling Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains through Regional Climate Summaries and Local Qualitative-Quantitative Scenario Planning Workshops project synthesizes climate data into 3-5 distinct but plausible climate…

The Scaling Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains through Regional Climate Summaries and Local Qualitative-Quantitative Scenario Planning Workshops project synthesizes climate data into 3-5 distinct but plausible climate…

Climate change poses major challenges for conservation and management because it alters the area, quality, and spatial distribution of habitat for natural populations. To assess species’ vulnerability to climate change and target ongoing…

The habitats and food resources required to support breeding and migrant birds dependent on North American prairie wetlands are threatened by impending climate change. The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) hosts nearly 120 species of…

Species distribution models (SDM) are used to help understand what drives the distribution of various plant and animal species. These models are typically high dimensional scalar functions, where the dimensions of the domain correspond to…

We reviewed existing and planned adaptation activities of federal, tribal, state, and local governments and the private sector in the United States (U.S.) to understand what types of adaptation activities are underway across different sectors and…

In the coming century, climate change is projected to impact precipitation and temperature regimes worldwide, with especially large effects in drylands. We use big sagebrush ecosystems as a model dryland ecosystem to explore the impacts of…

The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) are a network of partnerships throughout North America that are tasked with integrating science and management to support more effective delivery of conservation at a landscape scale. In order to…

Sediment accumulation threatens the viability and hydrologic functioning of many naturally formed depressional wetlands across the interior regions of North America. These wetlands provide many ecosystem services and vital habitats for diverse…

Evapotranspiration (ET) mapping at the Landsat spatial resolution (100 m) is essential to fully understand water use and water availability at the field scale. Water use estimates in the Colorado River Basin (CRB), which has diverse…

Correlative species distribution models are becoming commonplace in the scientific literature and public outreach products, displaying locations, abundance, or suitable environmental conditions for harmful invasive species, threatened and…

The development of different energy balance models has allowed users to choose a model based on its suitability in a region. We compared four commonly used models—Mapping EvapoTranspiration at high Resolution with Internalized Calibration (METRIC…

This 2-pager describes the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), which is a drought index that can serve as an indicator of both rapidly evolving “flash” droughts (developing over a few weeks) and sustained droughts (developing over months but…

There is growing evidence that the rate of warming is amplified with elevation, such that high-mountain environments experience more rapid changes in temperature than environments at lower elevations. Elevation-dependent warming (EDW) can…

Abstract (from http://www.islandpress.org/book/climate-change-in-wildlands): Scientists have been warning for years that human activity is heating up the…

Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954115001466): Anticipating the ecological effects of climate change to inform…

Abstract (from http://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/environsci.2015.2.400): State-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) are known for their…

"Motivation": The motivation for this briefing is to examine the large inhomogeneity (step shift) in the observed temperature record at the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) stations in the Intermountain West—Colorado,…

The Wyoming Basin Rapid Ecoregional Assessment was conducted in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The overall goals of the BLM Rapid Ecoregional Assessments (REAs) are to identify important ecosystems and wildlife habitats at…

Land managers in the Pacific Northwest have reported a need for updated scientific information on the ecology and management of mixed-conifer forests east of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington. Of particular concern are the moist mixed-…

Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2692-0/fulltext.html): The future rate of climate change in mountains has…

Ecological niche models predict plant responses to climate change by circumscribing species distributions within a multivariate environmental framework. Most projections based on modern bioclimatic correlations imply that high-elevation species…

The National Climate Assessment summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. A team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee produced the report, which…

Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL062803/abstract): Observations from the main mountain climate station network in the…

Abstract (from http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpls.2014.00785/abstract): Fire is a key ecological process affecting vegetation dynamics…

We assessed the ability of climatic, environmental, and anthropogenic variables to predict areas of high-risk for plant invasion and consider the relative importance and contribution of these predictor variables by considering two spatial scales…

Many semi-arid plant communities in western North America are dominated by big sagebrush. These ecosystems are being reduced in extent and quality due to economic development, invasive species, and climate change. These pervasive modifications…

Abstract (from 

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0111…): Projected climate change at a regional…

The potential evapotranspiration (PET) that would occur with unlimited plant access to water is a central driver of simulated plant growth in many ecological models. PET is influenced by solar and longwave radiation, temperature, wind speed, and…

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of the north-central U.S. and south-central Canada contains millions of small prairie wetlands that provide critical habitat to many migrating and breeding waterbirds. Due to their small size and the relatively…

Natural Resource Technical Report NPS/WICA/NRTR—2014/918

Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.4127/abstract):  Gridded topoclimatic datasets are increasingly used to drive many…

VisTrails is an open-source management and scientific workflow system designed to integrate the best of both scientific workflow and scientific visualization systems. Developers can extend the functionality of the VisTrails system by creating…

Abstract (from http://www.srmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.2111/REM-D-13-00079.1):  Big sagebrush, 

Artemisia tridentata  Nuttall (…

Buffelgrass, a highly competitive and flammable African bunchgrass, is spreading rapidly across both urban and natural areas in the Sonoran Desert of southern and central Arizona. Damages include increased fire risk, losses in biodiversity, and…

Managers need new tools for detecting the movement and spread of nonnative, invasive species. Habitat suitability models are a popular tool for mapping the potential distribution of current invaders, but the ability of these models to prioritize…

Assessments of vegetation response to climate change have generally been made only by equilibrium vegetation models that predict vegetation composition under steady-state conditions. These models do not simulate either ecosystem biogeochemical…

ABSTRACT: U.S. National Park Service land managers face a variety of challenges to preserving the biodiversity in their parks. A principle challenge is to minimize the impacts of surrounding land use on park condition and biodiversity. In the…

Abstract (from http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/12-2174.1):  Recent research on mountain-dwelling species has illustrated changes in species'…

Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320712002388):  U.S. National Park Service land managers face a variety of…

Gridded topoclimatic datasets are increasingly used to drive many ecological and hydrological models and assess climate change impacts. The use of such datasets is ubiquitous, but their inherent limitations are largely unknown or overlooked…

Abstract (from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070…): Managers of protected natural areas increasingly are…

Abstract (from http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/13-0905.1):  Many protected areas may not be adequately safeguarding biodiversity from human activities…

The Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling (SAHM) has been created to both expedite habitat modeling and help maintain a record of the various input data, pre- and post-processing steps and modeling options incorporated in the construction of a…

An important component in the fields of ecology and conservation biology is understanding the environmental conditions and geographic areas that are suitable for a given species to inhabit. A common tool in determining such areas is species…

Large shifts in species ranges have been predicted under future climate scenarios based primarily on niche-based species distribution models. However, the mechanisms that would cause such shifts are uncertain. Natural and anthropogenic fires have…

Seasonal change is important to consider when managing conservation areas at landscape scales. The study of such patterns throughout the year is referred to as phenology. Recurring life-cycle events that are initiated and driven by environmental…

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…

The information presented here provides the five-year science agenda for the North Central Climate Science Center. It is meant to be a high-level guide that describes the spatial context of the center, the primary partners and stakeholders, and…

Climate change models for the northern Rocky Mountains predict changes in temperature and water availability that in turn will alter vegetation. Changes include timing of plant life-history events, or phenology, such as green-up, flowering and…

State fish and wildlife agencies are required to submit a State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) every 10 years to be eligible for grants through the State Wildlife Grant Program. With the next round of revisions due in 2025, the U.S. Geological…