Project Overview Prairie dog colonies in North America’s Central Grasslands undergo cycles of collapse and recovery caused by the non-native sylvatic plague, and each phase of the cycle negatively affects wildlife or livestock. Researchers supported by this North Central-CASC project will develop a decision-support web tool for users to predict prairie dog colony dynamics under changing climatic conditions to help optimize management strategies of wildlife and cattle. Project Summary Prairie dogs are crucial to North America’s Central Grasslands, creating habitat for other wildlife by digging burrows and clipping vegetation, and serving as a key food source for many predators. However, the sylvatic plague, a non-native disease with over 99% mortality in prairie dogs leads to sudden population die-offs followed by several years of recovery. While wildlife that depend on prairie dogs for food and habitat are negatively affected when populations collapse, the recovery period can cause conflicts with livestock producers, as prairie dogs decrease the available vegetation for grazing cattle. Researchers supported by this project will create an interactive web-based tool that can be used by managers and stakeholders for decision support, as the tool predicts where and when prairie dog colony growth and collapses are likely to occur under changing climatic conditions. This should allow managers to strategically reduce the likelihood of undesirable outcomes for wildlife and livestock. Additionally, the interactive tool will help users determine the best management approaches to achieve their specific goals and will evaluate different management strategies with a cost analysis assessment. This project will involve a diverse group of stakeholders from state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and Tribal Nations to co-produce the tool. A decision support tool is much needed to facilitate co-existence of the prairie dog ecosystem with local communities and livestock producers, especially under an increasingly uncertain and changing climate.

Project Overview Climate change has reduced the amount of water stored in snowpacks and altered avalanche risks in mountainous areas of western North America. Researchers supported by this North Central-CASC project will develop tools for predicting and managing future water resources and future avalanche patterns, particularly in areas of major transportation corridors and important habitats. Results from this project will help federal, tribal, and state agencies manage snow water resources and mitigate avalanche hazards across temporal and spatial scales. Project Summary Climate change is profoundly affecting seasonal snowpack, with implications for water resources and water-related hazards like avalanches. Since 1950, the amount of water stored in snowpacks in western North America has decreased substantially because of declining winter precipitation and earlier snowmelt. These climatic changes also affect the frequency and magnitude of snow avalanches, which are dangerous to people, infrastructure, and mountain ecosystems. However, predicting future water resources and avalanche frequency is a challenge, as previous research from this project team demonstrates that avalanches are driven by complex interactions between weather, climate, and snowpack structure. This project has two distinct components related to snow as a water resource and a hazard. The first component addresses tribal partner needs for better tools for predicting and managing water resources and encompasses high-resolution snowpack data at a drainage scale. The second component focuses on snow as a hazard, addressing how changes to snowpack properties will impact future avalanche frequency and magnitude across the western United States. These research goals will help project team develop better tools for partners and stakeholders to address climate change impacts on snow and build more resilient communities. Understanding future changes in snowpack properties and avalanche behavior, including a shift in avalanche regime from cold and dry to warm and wet, can help managers predict and adapt to new water storage and avalanche patterns. Results from this project will provide valuable data for federal, tribal, and state management of snow water resources and avalanche mitigation.

As climate change progresses, profound environmental changes are becoming a widespread concern. A new management paradigm is developing to address this concern with a framework that encourages strategic decisions to resist, accept, or direct ecological trajectories. Effective use of the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework requires the scientific community to describe the range of plausible ecological conditions managers might face, while recognizing limits to our ability to predict precisely where or how specific climatic changes may unfold or how complex environmental systems will respond - the climatic future does not fully determine the ecological one. Recent advances have improved development and delivery of climate futures (summaries of climate conditions for each climate model projection), but approaches for creating and working with a range of ecological scenarios for each climate future do not yet exist. This project will develop potential approaches for crafting ecological scenarios, i.e., storylines designed to capture the range of plausible ecological responses to climate change. Researcher propose to synthesize and compare typical approaches for estimating ecological responses to climate change, consider extensions that allow for multiple ecological community or biome types under each climatic scenario, and develop approaches for “winnowing” a large set of plausible ecological scenarios into a workable, representative set.

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.

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.

Even when faced with uncertainty about future climate conditions, resource managers are tasked with making planning and adaptation decisions that impact important natural and cultural resources. Species distribution models are widely used by both researchers and managers to estimate species responses to climate change. These models combine data on environmental variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation) with field samples of a species’ presence, absence, and/or abundance to project and visualize potential habitat of the species across space and time. However, species distribution modeling software previously developed and supported by USGS (the Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling [SAHM] package for VisTrails) is no longer under active development. Furthermore, species distribution models alone are not able to represent all of the complex ecological dynamics that dictate actual species’ distributions; thus, species distribution models are most powerful when coupled to other types of modeling approaches. There is a need to develop a new system for generating, running, and visualizing species distribution models and for connecting them to other modeling tools. The goal of this project is to design and develop a prototype package for running species distribution models in the software platform, SyncroSim. This prototype package will improve the functionality of species distribution models for researchers and resource managers by: 1. allowing end users to customize existing species distribution models written in the R programming language, visualize and store data for different scenarios of species distribution model inputs and outputs, and run species distribution model workflows from SyncroSim; and 2. laying the foundation for more seamless integration of species distribution models with other modeling approaches.

Natural resource managers consistently identify invasive species as one of the biggest challenges for ecological adaptation to climate change. Yet climate change is often not considered during their management decision making. Given the many ways that invasive species and climate change will interact, such as changing fire regimes and facilitating the migration of high priority species, it is more critical than ever to integrate climate adaptation science and natural resource management. The coupling of climate adaptation and invasive species management remains limited by a lack of information, personnel, and funding. Those working on ecological adaptation to climate change have reported that information is not available or is not presented in a way that informs invasive species management. This project will expand the successful model of the Northeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network to the North Central region of the U.S. This effort will integrate the research and management of invasive species, climate change, and fire under one umbrella. Stakeholders in the North Central region have identified invasive species, woody encroachment, wildfire, and habitat and ecological transformation as key management issues which this project will address. A primary activity will be to host two Science Integration Workshops to pair management needs with research directions. From these workshops, strategic scientific products will be derived that include synthesis of existing information in a workshop report, summaries on management challenges adapted for the region, blog posts for managers, and collaboration with land managers to access and utilize existing climate and invasive species information and tools. The research team will work together with managers to understand key management needs surrounding invasive plant species in a changing climate.

Tribal resource managers in the southwest U.S. are facing a host of challenges related to environmental change, including increasing temperatures, longer periods of drought, and invasive species. These threats are exacerbating the existing challenges of managing complex ecosystems. In a rapidly changing environment, resource managers need powerful tools and the most complete information to make the most effective decisions possible.   Traditional Ecological Knowledge has enabled Indigenous peoples to adaptively manage and thrive in diverse environments for thousands of years, yet it is generally underutilized and undervalued, particularly in the context of western scientific approaches. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and western science offer complementary insights and, together, can facilitate climate change adaptation. This project will use both methods of understanding the environment to provide tribal resource managers cutting edge information about what their environment looked like in the past to better understand it in the present and make more informed decisions for the future.   In particular, this project will work directly with Ute Mountain Ute decision-makers in using a combination of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and paleo-ecological records to explore past vegetation changes relevant to the stakeholder community. This work will then inform a forward-looking assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation options. Tribal youth will be involved in collecting information, and in developing and distributing outreach materials that summarize the work. By utilizing both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and western science techniques, this project will: 1) show how two different methods of understanding the environment can be utilized in a resource management context to assist with decision making, 2) establish how useful these methods are in tandem, and 3) provide southwest resource managers with better historic and holistic information to use in resource management decision making. 

The NC CASC has conducted numerous training and skills development activities to support partners and researchers as they seek to use scientific information and techniques to understand and respond to climate change impacts. Training topics range from basics of climate data integration (climate 101) to more specific topics like climate training activities for Tribes and Indigenous Communities and training videos on climate projection tools like the Climate Futures Toolbox. To learn more about upcoming training events, check NCCASC website for events regularlly and sign up for the NCCASC newsletter for announcements.