-
Adaptation: Planning for Climate Change and Its Effects on Federal Lands
-
National forest managers are charged with tackling the effects of climate change on the natural resources
under their care. The Forest Service National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change and the Climate
Change Performance Scorecard require managers to make significant progress in addressing climate
change by 2015. To help land managers meet this challenge, Forest Service scientists conducted three case studies on national forests and adjacent national parks and documented a wide range of scientific issues and solutions. They summarized the scientific foundation for climate change adaptation and made the information accessible to land managers by creating a climate change adaptation guidebookand web portal. Case study teams discovered that collaboration among scientists and land managers is crucial to adaptation planning, as are management plans targeted to the particular ecosystem conditions and management priorities of each region. Many current management practices are consistent with climate change
adaptation goals. Because timely implementation is critical, strategies are in development at the national
level to speed the implementation of science-based climate change adaptation processes in national
forests throughout the country.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Adaptive management of biological systems: A review
-
Adaptive Management (AM) is widely considered to be the best available approach for managing biolog- ical systems in the presence of uncertainty. But AM has arguably only rarely succeeded in improving bio- diversity outcomes. There is therefore an urgent need for reflection regarding how practitioners might overcome key problems hindering greater implementation of AM. In this paper, we present the first structured review of the AM literature that relates to biodiversity and ecosystem management, with the aim of quantifying how rare AM projects actually are. We also investigated whether AM practitioners in terrestrial and aquatic systems described the same problems; the degree of consistency in how the term ‘adaptive management’ was applied; the extent to which AM projects were sustained over time; and whether articles describing AM projects were more highly cited than comparable non-AM articles. We found that despite the large number of articles identified through the ISI web of knowledge (n = 1336), only 61 articles (<5%) explicitly claimed to enact AM. These 61 articles cumulatively described 54 separate projects, but only 13 projects were supported by published monitoring data. The extent to which these 13 projects applied key aspects of the AM philosophy – such as referring to an underlying conceptual model, enacting ongoing monitoring, and comparing alternative management actions – varied enormously. Further, most AM projects were of short duration; terrestrial studies discussed biodiversity conservation significantly more frequently than aquatic studies; and empirical studies were no more highly cited than qualitative articles. Our review highlights that excessive use of the term ‘adaptive man- agement’ is rife in the peer-reviewed literature. However, a small but increasing number of projects have been able to effectively apply AM to complex problems. We suggest that attempts to apply AM may be improved by: (1) Better collaboration between scientists and representatives from resource-extracting industries. (2) Better communication of the risks of not doing AM. (3) Ensuring AM projects ‘‘pass the test of management relevance’’.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Addressing Climate-related Uncertainty - new NCTC course
-
The course will provide participants with a foundation in structured decision making in the context of natural resource management problems addressing climate-related uncertainty. It will also illustrate applications to water resource management, mitigation, and endangered species decisions.
Located in
News & Events
/
Events
-
Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets
-
Climate targets are designed to inform policies that would limit the
magnitude and impacts of climate change caused by anthropogenic
emissions of greenhouse gases and other substances. The target
that is currently recognized by most world governments1 places a
limit of two degrees Celsius on the global mean warming since
preindustrial times. This would require large sustained reductions
in carbon dioxide emissions during the twenty-first century and
beyond2–4. Such a global temperature target, however, is not sufficient
to control many other quantities, such as transient sea level
rise5
, ocean acidification6,7 and net primary production on land8,9.
Here, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity
(EMIC) in an observation-informed Bayesian approach, we show
that allowable carbon emissions are substantially reduced whenmultiple
climate targets are set. We take into account uncertainties in
physical and carbon cycle model parameters, radiative efficiencies10,
climate sensitivity11 and carbon cycle feedbacks12,13 along with a
large set of observational constraints. Within this framework, we
explore a broad range of economically feasible greenhouse gas scenarios
from the integrated assessment community14–17 to determine
the likelihood of meeting a combination of specific global
and regional targets under various assumptions. For any given
likelihood of meeting a set of such targets, the allowable cumulative
emissions are greatly reduced from those inferred from the temperature
target alone. Therefore, temperature targets alone are unable
to comprehensively limit the risks from anthropogenic emissions.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Assessing potential climate change effects on vegetation using a linked model approach
-
We developed a process that links the mechanistic power of dynamic global vegetation models with the detailed vegetation dynamics of state-and-transition models to project local vegetation shifts driven by projected climate change. We applied our approach to central Oregon (USA) ecosystems using three climate change scenarios to assess potential future changes in species composition and community structure. Our results suggest that: (1) legacy effects incorporated in state-and-transition models realistically dampen climate change effects on vegetation; (2) species-specific response to fire built into state-and- transition models can result in increased resistance to climate change, as was the case for ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests, or increased sensitivity to climate change, as was the case for some shrublands and grasslands in the study area; and (3) vegetation could remain relatively stable in the short term, then shift rapidly as a consequence of increased disturbance such as wildfire and altered environmental conditions. Managers and other land stewards can use results from our linked models to better anticipate potential climate-induced shifts in local vegetation and resulting effects on wildlife habitat.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Bias in the attribution of forest carbon sinks
-
A substantial fraction of the terrestrial carbon sink, past and present, may be incorrectly attributed to environmental change rather than changes in forest management.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality
-
Biodiversity loss can affect ecosystem functions and services1–4. Individual ecosystem functions generally show a positive asymptotic relationship with increasing biodiversity, suggesting that some species are redundant5–8. However, ecosystems are managed and conserved for multiple functions, which may require greater biodiversity. Here we present an analysis of published data from grassland biodiversity experiments9–11, and show that ecosystem multifunctionality does require greater numbers of species. We analysed each ecosystem function alone to identify species with desirable effects. We then calculated the number of species with positive effects for all possible combinations of functions. Our results show appreciable differences in the sets of species influ- encing different ecosystem functions, with average proportional overlap of about 0.2 to 0.5. Consequently, as more ecosystem pro- cesses were included in our analysis, more species were found to affect overall functioning. Specifically, for all of the analysed experiments, there was a positive saturating relationship between the number of ecosystem processes considered and the number of species influencing overall functioning. We conclude that because different species often influence different functions, studies focus- ing on individual processes in isolation will underestimate levels of biodiversity required to maintain multifunctional ecosystems.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Biotic Drivers of Stream Planform: Implications for Understanding the Past and Restoring the Future
-
Traditionally, stream channel planform has been viewed as a function of larger watershed and valley-scale physical variables, including valley slope, the amount of discharge, and sediment size and load. Biotic processes serve a crucial role in transforming channel planform among straight, braided, meandering, and anabranching styles by increasing stream-bank stability and the probability of avulsions, creating stable multithread (anabranching) channels, and affecting sedimentation dynamics. We review the role of riparian vegetation and channel-spanning obstructions—beaver dams and logjams—in altering channel–floodplain dynamics in the southern Rocky Mountains, and we present channel planform scenarios for combinations of vegetation and beaver populations or old-growth forest that control logjam formation. These conceptual models provide understanding of historical planform variability throughout the Holocene and outline the implications for stream restoration or management in broad, low-gradient headwater valleys, which are important for storing sediment, carbon, and nutrients and for supporting a diverse riparian community.
Keywords: stream planform, riparian vegetation, beaver, old-growth forest, restoration
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Buried by bad decisions
-
From the text: Alas, research shows that when human beings make decisions, they tend to focus on what they are getting and forget about what we are forgoing.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
-
Challenges in the conservation, rehabilitation and recovery of native stream salmonid populations: beyond the 2010 Luarca symposium
-
– In May 2010, I chaired a session on challenges to salmonid conservation at the international symposium
‘Advances in the population ecology of stream salmonids’ in Luarca, Spain. I suggested that in addition to scientific challenges, a major challenge will be improving the links between ecologists, conservationists and policy makers. Because the Luarca symposium focused mainly on ecological research, little time was explicitly devoted to conservation. My objective in this paper is to further discuss the role of ecological research in informing salmonid conservation. I begin with a brief overview of research highlights from the symposium. I then use selected examples to show that ecological research has already contributed much towards informing salmonid conservation, but that ecologists will always be faced with limitations in their predictive ability. I suggest that conservation will need to move forward regardless of these limitations, and I call attention to some recent efforts wherein ecological research has played a crucial role. I conclude that ecologists should take urgent action to ensure that their results are availableto inform resource managers, conservation organisations and policy makers regarding past losses and present threats to native, locally-adapted salmonid stocks.
Located in
Resources
/
Climate Science Documents
