Surface-water availability has been identified as one of the biggest issues facing society in the 21st century. Where and when water is on the landscape can have profound impacts on the economy, wildlife behavior, recreational use, industrial practices, energy development, and many other aspects of life, society, and the environment. Projections indicate that surface-water availability will be generally reduced in the future because of multiple factors including climate change, increased drought frequency and severity, and altered water and land use. Thus, it is important resource managers understand which areas are most vulnerable to reduced water availability impacts, and to what extent current conditions may change.   This project aims to create an index, the Surface-Water Index of Permanence (SWIPe), to determine when and where surface water will remain permanent on the landscape. It will build on previous work looking at streamflow permanence (using the USGS PROSPER model), surface-water inundation extent (using the USGS DSWE model), and wetland extents and permanence (using remotely sensed vegetation characteristics). Outcomes of this work will deliver crucial information on where surface water is most likely to be reduced under drought conditions.   The research team will also work with partners to develop index outputs that are useful for exploring current and potential future surface-water availability characteristics and how they might affect bison behavior. This information linking surface-water permanence with wildlife behavior will be critical to improving the ability to mitigate the potential effects of reduced surface-water availability for wildlife and humans. 

Across the western U.S., pinyon and juniper trees are expanding into sagebrush and grassland plant communities. This vegetation change has been perceived to have a significant impact on the economic value of these grasslands, which support activities such as livestock grazing and hunting, but expanding pinyon and juniper forests may also lead to increased risk of fire. Over the past several decades pinyon-juniper forests have been removed across large areas of land to improve wildlife habitat and grazing land productivity while reducing risks of wildland fire. What isn’t known is whether these strategies are effective in reaching this goal, especially given that our future climate will likely be hotter and drier across many regions of the western U.S. This project will develop a tool that can inform management decisions on where, when, and how to prioritize pinyon-juniper treatments under a future climate that is likely to be hotter and drier. This work will be conducted primarily on the Colorado Plateau, in the states of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. The study aims to support collaboration between resource managers and researchers to create a support tool for planning, implementing, and evaluating pinyon-juniper treatments. The research team will then guide a broader community of stakeholders in using this tool in planning future pinyon-juniper treatments under changing climate conditions.

The long-term success of management efforts in sagebrush habitats are increasingly complicated by the impacts of a changing climate throughout the western United States. These complications are most evident in the ongoing challenges of drought and altered rangeland fire regimes resulting from the establishment of nonnative annual grasses. The Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy recognized these growing threats to sagebrush habitat and initiated the development of an Actionable Science Plan to help the scientific and management communities address the highest priority science needs to help improve rangeland management efficacy in the West. Since the establishment of the original Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy Actionable Science Plan in 2015, a considerable amount of climate science research has focused on western rangelands. Before the identification of the next set of priorities, there needs to be an assessment of how that science addressed the initially identified set of priorities. This research project will develop a scorecard that will provide the science and management communities with a clear understanding of how well the initially identified management priorities related to climate change and adaptation have been addressed since 2015. This will provide a baseline for discussions about the actionable science needed to continue to address the issues driving the loss, degradation, and fragmentation of sagebrush habitats in the western United States. The research team will 1) host a series of stakeholder meetings with rangeland researchers and agency managers to compile a set of current science needs related to climate science, 2) refine those needs through community input, and 3) host a series of prioritization meetings with a broadened stakeholder group to identify and update high priority climate science needs around rangeland management. These will form the basis of the next Actionable Science Plan and help focus the science and management communities on funding and implementing science activities that will address these needs in the coming years.

Understanding the paths by which water flows through the landscape is critical for providing fresh water for human use, maintaining ecosystem function, and better predicting how disturbances such as fire or drought may impact water quantity and water quality. Yet projected changes in climate, disturbances, and land use , are likely to alter hydrologic flow paths, and .natural resource managers increasingly require information about projected changes in water flow paths to plan for the future.  To meet this need, researchers will conduct a synthesis of changing hydrologic processes in the North Central region, and communicate the identified management options and opportunities to natural resource managers in federal and state agencies. Through this project, a postdoctoral fellow will evaluate:   1) how water flow paths and water quality vary with land-use and disturbance regimes;   2)how shifts in the timing and magnitude of snow and rain inputs alter low flows and stream permanence; and  3) how forest management techniques, such as forest thinning, can mitigate the sensitivity of forests and streamflow to droughts   The results of this project can help natural resource managers better understand the future of aquatic flows in the North Central region and will also contribute to a national-scale synthesis on the future of aquatic flows across the United States.  

The Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) is an iconic landscape with national parks, iconic species like grizzly bears and elk, and over 11,500 square miles of forest. While fires are a natural part of the GYA, climate change and land management legacies are increasing the frequency and size of severe fires. Climate change interacts with these fires to shift conifer forests to non-forested grassland and sagebrush ecosystems. These transformations impact species habitat, carbon storage, and other management goals on public lands. However, managing for “natural ecosystems” is not always possible in the face of climate change. The Resist-Accept-Direct framework (RAD) can help: under RAD, managers can resist change to maintain ecosystems, accept climate- and wildfire-driven ecological change, even if that means losing species habitat or ecosystem services, or direct ecosystem changes to maintain or gain key resources or services. For this project, researchers will work with managers in the GYA to implement RAD as a strategy to manage wildfires and subsequent ecosystem changes. With managers from each GYA agency researchers will identify 1) shared and unique management goals, 2) management options that can resist, accept, or direct wildfire-related ecosystem changes, and 3) ways to coordinate RAD implementation across agencies, since fires span management boundaries on the landscape This project will help managers identify and coordinate approaches to achieve their conservation goals in the context of climate change, ensuring the preservation of key species, ecosystems, and resources in the North Central CASC region’s public lands.

Over the last half-century, grassland bird populations have declined far more than any other bird group in North America. This is because native grasslands were largely replaced with croplands, and many remaining prairies are degraded. Land managers and conservation organizations are racing to preserve and restore these ecosystems to stem further loss of grassland birds. Given limited resources, bird habitat models are needed to help managers prioritize where conservation efforts will be most effective. In addition to habitat loss and degradation from land use change, altered fire regimes, and woody encroachment, increasing greenhouse gas emissions will likely change temperatures and rainfall patterns across North American grasslands. The effects of these changes in climate are expected to cascade to vegetation communities and the bird species that depend on them. To date, predictions for bird responses to a changing climate have focused on changes in temperature and precipitation, but vegetation productivity (and therefore grassland bird habitat) also depends on factors such as vegetation type and soils. In this project, researchers will study how vegetation influences grassland birds across the western Great Plains and create maps of projected bird distribution given vegetation and land use change under multiple future climate scenarios. Anticipating future bird distribution will help partners understand the regional and climate contexts of site-level projects, including USDA-Agriculture Research Service scientists seeking to target real world solutions for grazing land management that enhance livestock production and bird conservation. These maps will also help Audubon Rockies as they plan expansion of the Conservation Ranching Initiative, which helps ensure livestock grazing operations are “bird friendly” and will provide guidance for conservation actions implemented by Private Lands Biologists with Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. Modules and a web-based application accompanying these maps will increase capacity among Federal, State, Tribal, and private land managers and decision makers in their conservation planning under a changing climate.

Invasions of exotic annual grasses (EAGs like cheatgrass have caused major losses of native shrubs and grasses  in western U.S. rangelands. They also decrease the productivity and carbon storage in these ecosystems, which is expected to create dryer soils that may cause further losses in plant productivity. This cycle is the hallmark of desertification – or, fertile lands turning into deserts. Management actions that target EAGs are one of the most widespread land management actions taken in Western U.S. rangelands, but it is unclear which specific actions can simultaneously enhance drought resilience of native plant communities and increase carbon sequestration and storage. This project aims to identify the restoration treatments that are effective in combating EAGs in western rangelands by collecting data to describe the impacts of EAGs on soil carbon and to determine when, where, and how restoration actions such as applying herbicides or planting perennial native plants affect soil carbon and drought resilience. To address a key concern of land managers, the public, and national policy-makers, project researchers will work with a team of land managers across Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado to 1) refine and confirm the suitability of sampling locations, 2) connect with private landowners and land managers to access sampling locations, 3) engage managers in the science discovery process (e.g., interpreting data results) to share ownership of the findings, and 4) co-produce translational guidance for carbon sequestration metrics and for what changes to expect  in carbon sequestration and its co-benefits following restoration to prevent or rectify EAG invasions.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the largest area of public lands in the United States and manages those lands for diverse and sometimes conflicting resources, uses, and values. As a result, decision-making on BLM lands is complex. Decisions that are informed by the best available science – including climate science – are more likely to allow public land managers to balance different desired uses and values across public landscapes and achieve long-term land management goals. Strengthening the use of science and climate information in federal decision making is a priority for the current administration and for federal agencies, including the BLM. The Climate Adaptation Science Centers are committed to developing climate science that is relevant to decision making. However, conducting a comprehensive review of available science, including climate science, is challenging for BLM land managers due to the volume of science often available and the limited time staff have to compile and synthesize that information. The goal of this project is to develop (and evaluate the utility of) a family of climate-informed short science syntheses and accompanying worked environmental impact analysis examples. Both products will include climate sections to help land managers more quickly understand and assess the influence of changing climate conditions on resources. Both products will also be specifically designed to provide information and analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The BLM conducts well over a thousand comprehensive NEPA analyses each year to analyze and disclose to the public the potential environmental impacts of each of their decisions. Thus the products produced in this project, which will focus in the sagebrush biome where many BLM lands occur, has the potential to strengthen science use in hundreds of public lands decisions each year. The project will be conducted in partnership with BLM and US FWS to help ensure that the resulting products are useful and used by managers to strengthen the science, and climate science, foundation for public land management.

Mountain ecosystems are prioritized by the North Central CASC due to the provided water resources, recreation opportunities, and endemic biodiversity. Mountain ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change due to elevation-dependent warming, loss of snowpack, reduction in physical area at higher elevations, and general sensitivity of alpine species to climate. Current climate adaptation strategies for this ecosystem include preservation of potential species refugia, connection of migratory pathways between habitat, management of recreation impacts, and modification of snow inputs. Many of these landscapes also fall within wilderness designation, constraining the range of options available for climate adaptation strategies. Further, at fine spatial and temporal scales applicable to management the patterns of climate change, subsequent biological responses, and success of climate adaptation strategies will likely be difficult to generalize across sites due to the idiosyncrasies of local geography (e.g., topography, soils).  This project’s overall objective is to produce a robust initiative for climate adaptation research in mountain ecosystems for the North Central CASC. This synthesis work aims to increase knowledge production and co-production of climate adaptation strategies for mountain ecosystems with federal, tribal, and academic partners in the North Central region. The research team investigate what are our knowledge gaps of mountain ecosystem responses to climate change that limit our ability to perform successful climate adaptation by: 1. Synthesizing literature on climate and biological trends in mountains across the study region; 2. Synthesizing literature on societal interests (e.g., water resources) and management actions (e.g., preservation) for this ecosystem in the context of changing climate; 3. Summarizing a prospective regional research agenda for climate adaptation in the mountain ecosystem for presentation to stake- and rights-holders; 4. Analyzing of publicly available biological datasets in mountains for temporal trends, regional patterns; 5. Documenting of climate adaptation case studies to address regional mountain management priorities, challenges, and opportunities; and 6. Creating a research and management initiative for climate adaptation in mountain ecosystems in the North Central region.

A rapidly changing climate during this century poses a high risk for impacts to ecosystems, biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. A better understanding of how climate change might alter temperature, precipitation, heat stress, water availability and other extreme weather metrics in the coming century would be useful to natural resource managers at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the North Central region. Particularly, when they prepare to conduct Species Status Assessments to better evaluate risk to ecosystems, biodiversity and traditional livelihoods resulting from a changing climate. Scientists have traditionally gone through the time intensive process of extracting and analyzing different climate datasets (e.g., temperature and precipitation) to produce a comprehensive quantitative summary for different climate scenarios. However, these methods have not been efficient in meeting the growing demand and is challenging the capacity of the human resources. This project aims to develop a web-based interactive tool to deliver such information in a much more timely and user-friendly manner. This research project will develop an interactive tool using the existing computational and data-intensive platform provided by the Climate Toolbox, a highly recognized data delivery and climate analytic tool. Using this existing structure to develop this much needed tool will make the process more efficient, cost effective, and assure its long-term maintenance. The US Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and regional Tribe cooperators will inform the development of this tool, including developing new datasets and functionalities for the tool, and assessing its usability. The resulting open-source tool will be accessible and applicable to a wide variety of CASC-stakeholders across the contiguous United States.