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Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Systems
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Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case studies from around the world shows that couplings between human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organizational units. They also exhibit nonlinear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises. Furthermore, past couplings have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities.
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Conservation Biology: Predicting Birds’ Responses to Forest Fragmentation
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Understanding species’ ecological responses to habitat fragmentation is critical for biodiversity conservation, especially in tropical forests. A detailed recent study has shown that changes in the abundances of bird species following fragmentation may be dramatic and unpredictable.
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Conservation Planning Process
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Dr. Robert Baldwin of Clemson University explains in this video the steps involved in the conservation planning process.
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Archive GIS
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GIS & Planning
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Conservation VALUE OF ROADLESS AREAS FOR VULNERABLE FISH AND Wildlife Species in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, Montana
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The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem is one of the most spectacular landscapes
in the world and most ecologically intact ecosystem remaining in the
contiguous United States. Straddling the Continental Divide in the heart of the
Rocky Mountains, the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem extends for >250
miles from the fabled Blackfoot River valley in northwest Montana north to Elk
Pass south of Banff and Kootenay National Parks in Canada. It reaches from
the short-grass plains along the eastern slopes of the Rockies westward nearly
100 miles to the Flathead and Kootenai River valleys. The Crown sparkles with
a variety of dramatic landscapes, clean sources of blue waters, and diversity of
plants and animals.Over the past century, citizens and government leaders have worked hard to
save the core of this splendid ecosystem in Montana by establishing world-class
parks and wildernesses – coupled with conservation of critical wildlife habitat
on state and private lands along the periphery. These include jewels such as
Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall-Scapegoat-Great Bear Wilderness,
the first-ever Tribal Wilderness in the Mission Mountains, numerous State of
Montana Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), and vital private lands through
land trusts such as The Nature Conservancy. Their combined efforts have
protected 3.3 million acres and constitute a truly impressive commitment to
conservation. It was a remarkable legacy and great gift …but, in the face of new
challenges, it may not have been enough.
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Conserving the Stage: Climate Change and the Geophysical Underpinnings of Species Diversity
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Conservationists have proposed methods for adapting to climate change that assume species distributions are primarily explained by climate variables. The key idea is to use the understanding of species-climate relationships to map corridors and to identify regions of faunal stability or high species turnover. An alternative approach is to adopt an evolutionary timescale and ask ultimately what factors control total diversity, so that over the long run the major drivers of total species richness can be protected. Within a single climatic region, the temperate area encompassing all of the Northeastern U.S. and Maritime Canada, we hypothesized that geologic factors may take precedence over climate in explaining diversity patterns.
If geophysical diversity does drive regional diversity, then conserving geophysical settings may offer an approach to conservation that protects diversity under both current and future climates. Here we tested how well geology predicts the species diversity of 14 US states and three Canadian provinces, using a comprehensive new spatial dataset. Results of linear regressions of species diversity on all possible combinations of 23 geophysical and climatic variables indicated that four geophysical factors; the number of geological classes, latitude, elevation range and the amount of calcareous bedrock, predicted species diversity with certainty (adj. R2 = 0.94). To confirm the species-geology relationships we ran an
independent test using 18,700 location points for 885 rare species and found that 40% of the species were restricted to a single geology. Moreover, each geology class supported 5–95 endemic species and chi-square tests confirmed that calcareous bedrock and extreme elevations had significantly more rare species than expected by chance (P,0.0001), strongly corroborating the regression model. Our results suggest that protecting geophysical settings will conserve the stage for current and future biodiversity and may be a robust alternative to species-level predictions.
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Cross-scale Drivers of Natural Disturbances Prone to Anthropogenic Amplification: The Dynamics of Bark Beetle Eruptions
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Biome-scale disturbances by eruptive herbivores provide valuable insights into species interactions, ecosystem function, and impacts of global change. We present a conceptual framework using one system as a model, emphasizing interactions across levels of biological hierarchy and spatiotemporal scales. Bark beetles are major natural disturbance agents in western North American forests. However, recent bark beetle population eruptions have exceeded the frequencies, impacts, and ranges documented during the previous 125 years. Extensive host abundance and susceptibility, concentrated beetle density, favorable weather, optimal symbiotic associations, and escape from natural enemies must occur jointly for beetles to surpass a series of thresholds and exert widespread disturbance. Opposing feedbacks determine qualitatively distinct outcomes at junctures at the biochemical through landscape levels. Eruptions occur when key thresholds are surpassed, prior constraints cease to exert influence, and positive feedbacks amplify across scales. These dynamics are bidirectional, as landscape features influence how lower-scale processes are amplified or buffered. Climate change and reduced habitat heterogeneity increase the likelihood that key thresholds will be exceeded, and may cause fundamental regime shifts. Systems in which endogenous feedbacks can dominate after external forces foster the initial breach of thresholds appear particularly sensitive to anthropogenic perturbations.
Keywords: thresholds, plant-insect interactions, landscape disturbance, forest management, anthropogenic change
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Curran, Joanna
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Declining annual streamflow distributions in the Pacific Northwest United States, 1948–2006
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Much of the discussion on climate change and water in the western United States centers on decreased snowpack and earlier spring runoff. Although increasing variability in annual flows has been noted, the nature of those changes is largely unexplored. We tested for trends in the distribution of annual runoff using quantile regression at 43 gages in the Pacific Northwest. Seventy-two percent of the stations showed significant (a = 0.10) declines in the 25th percentile annual flow, with half of the stations exceeding a 29% decline and a maximum decline of 47% between 1948 and 2006. Fewer stations showed statistically significant declines in either median or mean annual flow, and only five had a significant change in the 75th percentile, demonstrating that increases in variance result primarily from a trend of increasing dryness in dry years. The asymmetric trends in streamflow distributions have implications for water management and ecology well beyond those of shifted timing alone, affect both rain and snow-dominated watersheds, and contribute to earlier timing trends in high- elevation watersheds.
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Ecological Effects of Prescribed Fire Season: A Literature Review and Synthesis for Managers
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Prescribed burning may be conducted at times of the year when fires were infrequent historically, leading to concerns about potential adverse effects on vegetation and wildlife. Historical and prescribed fire regimes for different regions in the continental United States were compared and literature on season of prescribed burning synthesized. In regions and vegetation types where considerable differences in fuel consumption exist among burning seasons, the effects of prescribed fire season appears, for many ecological variables, to be driven more by fire-intensity differences among seasons than by phenology or growth stage of organisms at the time of fire. Where fuel consumption differs little among burning seasons, the effect of phenology or growth stage of organisms is often more apparent, presumably because it is not overwhelmed by fire-intensity differences. Most species in ecosystems that evolved with fire appear to be resilient to one or few out-of-season prescribed burn(s). However, a variable fire regime including prescribed burns at different times of the year may alleviate the potential for undesired changes and maximize biodiversity.
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Ecological Forestry Workshop for US Fish & Wildlife Service
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This is an extremely valuable workshop for anyone in any Service program working with forest conservation issues, especially involving Threatened and Endangered and migratory bird species.
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