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.

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.

Prescribed burning – planned, controlled fires conducted under weather and fuel conditions designed for safety and effectiveness – is a common practice used to maintain and restore native prairies in the Northern Great Plains. However, climate change will affect the number of days in a year, and when,  suitable conditions for prescribed fires occur. For instance, warmer temperatures may shift these “good prescribed-fire days” earlier in the spring and later in the fall, but uncertainty about future climate makes it hard to predict how large shifts will be and if the number of good fire days each year will generally increase or decrease. Further, it’s hard to know whether prescribed fires will continue to achieve their goals in new conditions. This project will measure how the number and timing of good fire days has changed over the last 30 years and predict how  they will change over the next 50 years under four plausible future climate scenarios. Changes to longer-term weather patterns – in the seasons leading up to and following prescribed fires – may also change the effectiveness of the fires in achieving their goals, like reducing Kentucky bluegrass, cheatgrass, and other invasive grasses. To address this issue, the project will also use data from long-term plant monitoring programs to look for patterns in how prairie responds to prescribed fire in different seasonal and annual weather conditions. Land management agencies in the Northern Great Plains like the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service use prescribed fires often, so it is important for them to understand how climate change will affect the number and timing of good prescribed-fire days and fire’s effects. To that end, the ultimate goal of this project is to create a model that will help managers develop effective prescribed fire strategies for an uncertain future climate.

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.

In the North Central region, invasive species and climate change are intricately linked to changing fire regimes, and together, these drivers can have pronounced effects on ecosystems. When fires burn too hot or too frequently, they can prevent slow-growing native plants from regrowing. When this happens, the landscape can transform into a new type of ecosystem, such as a forest becoming a grassland. This process is known as “ecosystem transformation”. This project will explore key management priorities including native community resilience and management of invasive species, wildfire, and ecosystem change, in a collaboration of researchers working directly with land managers and other stakeholders through the North Central Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (NC RISCC) network. The team will identify areas in the North Central region that have experienced ecological transformation due to invasive grasses and their interactions with wildfire or climate change; calculate changes in carbon storage that have accompanied these transformations; and determine areas that are vulnerable to future transformation. Researchers will also identify which management practices enhance carbon storage, a key ecosystem service that agencies want to include in management plans and strategies, yet largely have not yet done so. Through this project, managers and researchers will gain a better understanding of the processes behind ecosystem transformation, as well as the carbon consequences of these changes and the management practices that can address them. This work can be used to adapt management plans for important ecosystem services that may be agency- or organization-specific, including carbon storage, native plant diversity, and ecosystem resilience. This work is critical to addressing the interactions of climate change with both invasive grasses and wildfire, as well as identifying adaptation strategies to restore carbon in forests and shrublands across the North Central region after these disturbances.

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.

The National Park Service is responsible for managing livestock grazing on 94 locations across the country and several grazing management planning efforts for this work are underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management plans to address potential future effects of climate change on related resources and practices. This is the second phase of a project that is using scenario planning (a strategic planning technique used to inform decision-making in the face of uncertain future conditions) to support grazing management at Dinosaur National Monument. In the first phase of the project (Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks), the research team  convened a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to qualitatively assess how grazing resources and management at Dinosaur National Monument may be affected under climate change. Now in phase two, this project will develop an ecological modeling approach to provide quantitative information about potential future scenarios to grazing management planning, continuing with Dinosaur National Monument as a case study. It will leverage recent advances in modeling to estimate the combined effects of climate change scenarios and alternative management actions (e.g., stocking rates, prescribed fire, and invasive plant management) on rangeland vegetation. The results of this project will add to the development of a transferable process to help parks ensure that grazing management practices are responsive and adaptive to future climate change.