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Cumberland - Southern Appalachian Climate Change Vulnerability Species Assessments
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the southeastern portion of the LCC, covering the area from southern West Virginia, south to Alabama, west to eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Hyperlinks to additional information are separated into two additional spreadsheets, one for aquatic and subterranean, and another for terrestrial species.
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
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Feedbacks of Terrestrial Ecosystems to Climate Change
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Most modeling studies on terrestrial feedbacks to warming over the twenty-first century imply that the net feedbacks are negative—that changes in ecosystems, on the whole, resist warming, largely through ecosystem carbon storage. Although it is clear that potentially important mechanisms can lead to carbon storage, a number of less well- understood mechanisms, several of which are rarely or incompletely modeled, tend to diminish the negative feedbacks or lead to positive feedbacks. At high latitudes, negative feedbacks from forest expansion are likely to be largely or completely compensated by positive feedbacks from decreased albedo, increased carbon emissions from thawed permafrost, and increased wildfire. At low latitudes, negative feedbacks to warming will be decreased or eliminated, largely through direct human impacts. With modest warming, net feedbacks of terrestrial ecosystems to warming are likely to be negative in the tropics and positive at high latitudes. Larger amounts of warming will generally push the feedbacks toward the positive.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Invited Review: Quantifying surface albedo and other direct biogeophysical climate forcings of forestry activities
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By altering fluxes of heat, momentum, and moisture exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere, forestry and other land-use activities affect climate. Although long recognized scientifically as being important, these so-called biogeophysical forcings are rarely included in climate policies for forestry and other land management projects due to the many challenges associated with their quantification. Here, we review the scientific literature in the fields of atmospheric science and terrestrial ecology in light of three main objectives: (i) to elucidate the challenges associated with quantifying biogeophysical climate forcings connected to land use and land management, with a focus on the forestry sector; (ii) to identify and describe scientific approaches and/or metrics facilitating the quantification and interpretation of direct biogeophysical climate forcings; and (iii) to identify and recommend research priorities that can help overcome the challenges of their attribution to specific land-use activities, bridging the knowledge gap between the climate modeling, forest ecology, and resource management communities. We find that ignoring surface
biogeophysics may mislead climate mitigation policies, yet existing metrics are unlikely to be sufficient. Successful metrics ought to (i) include both radiative and nonradiative climate forcings; (ii) reconcile disparities between biogeophysical and biogeochemical forcings, and (iii) acknowledge trade-offs between global and local climate benefits. We call for more coordinated research among terrestrial ecologists, resource managers, and coupled climate modelers to harmonize datasets, refine analytical techniques, and corroborate and validate metrics that are more amenable to analyses at the scale of an individual site or region.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Evaporative cooling over the Tibetan Plateau induced by vegetation growth
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Here, we show that in contrast to arctic regions, increased growing season vegetation activity over the TP may have attenuated surface warming. This negative feedback on growing season vegetation temperature is attributed to enhanced evapotranspiration (ET). The extra energy available at the surface, which results from lower albedo, is efficiently dissipated by evaporative cooling. The net effect is a decrease in daily maximum temperature and the diurnal temperature range, which is supported by statistical analyses of in situ observations and by decomposition of the surface energy budget. A daytime cooling effect from increased vegetation activity is also modeled from a set of regional weather research and forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model simulations, but with a magnitude smaller than observed, likely because the WRF model simulates a weaker ET enhancement. Our results suggest that actions to restore native grasslands in degraded areas, roughly one-third of the plateau, will both facilitate a sustainable ecological development in this region and have local climate cobenefits. More accurate simulations of the biophysical coupling between the land surface and the atmosphere are needed to help understand regional climate change over the TP, and possible larger scale feedbacks between climate in the TP and the Asian monsoon system.
Located in
Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Cumberland - Southern Appalachian Climate Change Vulnerability Species Assessments
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the southeastern portion of the LCC, covering the area from southern West Virginia, south to Alabama, west to eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Hyperlinks to additional information are separated into two additional spreadsheets, one for aquatic and subterranean, and another for terrestrial species.
Located in
Research
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Assessing Vulnerability of Species and Habitats to Large-scale Impacts
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
