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At least 1,297 records · Page 72Linked to original sources
USGS2018

Land cover and land use change

Climate can affect and be affected by changes in land cover (the physical features that cover the land such as trees or pavement) and land use (human management and activities on land, such as mining or recreation). A forest, for instance, would likely include tree cover but could also include areas of recent tree removals currently covered by open grass areas. Land cover and use are inherently coupled: changes in land-use practices can change land cover, and land cover enables specific land uses. Understanding how land cover, use, condition, and management vary in space and time is challenging. Changes in land cover can occur in response to both human and climate drivers. For example, demand for new settlements often results in the permanent loss of natural and working lands, which can result in localized changes in weather patterns, temperature, and precipitation. Aggregated over large areas, these changes have the potential to influence Earth’s climate by altering regional and global circulation patterns, changing the albedo (reflectivity) of Earth’s surface, and changing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere. Conversely, climate change can also influence land cover, resulting in a loss of forest cover from climate-related increases in disturbances, the expansion of woody vegetation into grasslands, and the loss of beaches due to coastal erosion amplified by rises in sea level. Land use is also changed by both human and climate drivers. Land-use decisions are traditionally based on short-term economic factors. Land-use changes are increasingly being influenced by distant forces due to the globalization of many markets. Land use can also change due to local, state, and national policies, such as programs designed to remove cultivation from highly erodible land to mitigate degradation, legislation to address sea level rise in local comprehensive plans, or policies that reduce the rate of timber harvest on federal lands. Technological innovation has also influenced land-use change, with the expansion of cultivated lands from the development of irrigation technologies and, more recently, decreases in demand for agricultural land due to increases in crop productivity. The recent expansion of oil and gas extraction activities throughout large areas of the United States demonstrates how policy, economics, and technology can collectively influence and change land use and land cover. Decisions about land use, cover, and management can help determine society’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Report↗
USGS2010

Do competitors modulate rare plant response to precipitation change?

Ecologists increasingly suspect that climate change will directly impact species physiology, demography, and phenology, but also indirectly affect these measures via changes to the surrounding community. Unfortunately, few studies examine both the direct and indirect pathways of impact. Doing so is important because altered competitive pressures can reduce or magnify the direct responses of a focal species to climate change. Here, we examine the effects of changing rainfall on three rare annual plant species in the presence and absence of competition on the California Channel Islands. We used rain-out shelters and hand watering to exclude and augment early, late, and season-long rainfall, spanning the wide range of precipitation change forecast for the region. In the absence of competition, droughts reduced the population growth rates of two of three focal annuals, while increased rainfall was only sometimes beneficial, As compared to the focal species, the dominant competitors were more sensitive to the precipitation treatments, benefiting from increased season-long precipitation and harmed by droughts. Importantly, the response of two of three competitors to the precipitation treatments tended to be positively correlated with those of the focal annuals. Although this leads to the expectation that increased competition will counter the direct benefits of favorable conditions, such indirect effects of precipitation change proved weak to nonexistent in our experiment. Competitors had little influence on the precipitation response of two focal species, due to their low sensitivity to competition and highly variable precipitation responses. Competition did affect how our third focal species responded to precipitation change, but this effect only approached significance, and whether it truly resulted from competitor response to precipitation change was unclear. Our work suggests that even when competitors respond to climate change, these responses may have little effect on the focal species. Ultimately, the strength of the indirect effect depends on how strongly climate change alters competition, and how sensitive focal species are to changes in competition. ?? 2010 by the Ecological Society of America.

Ecology↗
USGS2021

Streamflow response to potential changes in climate in the Upper Rio Grande Basin

The Rio Grande is a vital water source for the southwestern States of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas and for northern Mexico. The river serves as the primary source of water for irrigation in the region, has many environmental and recreational uses, and is used by more than 13 million people including those in the Cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. However, concern is growing over the increasing gap between water supply and demand in the Upper Rio Grande Basin. As populations increase and agricultural crop patterns change, demands for water are increasing, at the same time the region is undergoing a decrease in supply due to drought and climate change. Quantifying the impact of projected climate change on Rio Grande streamflow is difficult because of numerous anthropogenic influences on the hydrologic system. The conveyance and use of surface water in the Upper Rio Grande Basin are achieved through an engineered system of reservoirs, diversions, and irrigation canals designed to deliver water to agricultural, municipal, and industrial users, who greatly reduce the cumulative volume of water in the river. For example, streamflow at Fort Quitman, Tex., the southernmost point of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, has undergone a 95-percent reduction in flow relative to the river’s native state, and some stretches of the river can intermittently go dry. Because streamflow in the basin is highly altered, disentangling the impacts of climate change and changes in streamflow due to anthropogenic influences such as dams, diversions, and other forms of water use is difficult. Therefore, a model of naturalized flow was developed to determine to what degree changes in streamflow can be attributed to potential changes in future temperature and precipitation without quantifying future changes in anthropogenic influences. This study, conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, included the development and calibration of a watershed model of the Upper Rio Grande Basin using the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System to simulate naturalized streamflow conditions for historical and future time periods.

Colorado, New Mexico, Texas↗
USGS2017

Child health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa: A comparison of changes in climate and socio-economic factors

We compare changes in low birth weight and child malnutrition in 13 African countries under projected climate change versus socio-economic development scenarios. Climate scenarios are created by linking surface temperature gradients with declines in seasonal rainfall sea along with warming values of 1 °C and 2 °C. Socio-economic scenarios are developed by assigning regionally specific changes in access to household electricity and mother's education. Using these scenarios, in combination with established models of children's health, we investigate and compare the changes in predicted health outcomes. We find that the negative effects of warming and drying on child stunting could be mitigated by positive development trends associated with increasing mothers’ educational status and household access to electricity. We find less potential for these trends to mitigate how warming and drying trends impact birth weights. In short, under warming and drying, the risk of more malnourished children is greater than the risk of more children with low birth weights, but increases in child malnutrition could be averted in regions that increase access to educational resources and basic infrastructure.

Global Environmental Change↗
USGS2021

Limited shifts in the distribution of migratory bird breeding habitat density in response to future changes in climate

Grasslands, and the depressional wetlands that exist throughout them, are endangered ecosystems that face both climate and land-use change pressures. Tens of millions of dollars are invested annually to manage the existing fragments of these ecosystems to serve as critical breeding habitat for migratory birds. The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is a region that contains millions of depressional wetlands that produce between 50 and 80% of the continent’s waterfowl population and. Previous modeling efforts suggested that climate change would result in a shift of suitable waterfowl breeding habitat from the central to the southeast portion of the PPR, an area where over half of the wetlands have been drained. The implications of these projections suggest a massive investment in wetland restoration in the southeastern PPR would be needed to sustain waterfowl populations at harvestable levels. We revisited these modeled results indicating how future climate may impact the distribution of waterfowl-breeding habitat using up-to-date climate model projections and a newly developed model for simulating prairie-pothole wetland hydrology. We also presented changes to the number of “May ponds,” a metric used by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to estimate waterfowl breeding populations and establish harvest regulations. Based on the output of 32 climate models and 2 emission scenarios, we found no evidence that the distribution of May ponds would shift in the future. However, our results projected a 17% decrease to 5% increase in May-pond numbers when comparing the most recent climate period (1989–2018) to the end of the 21st century (2070–2099). When combined, our results suggest areas in the PPR that that currently support the highest densities of intact wetland basins, and thus support the largest numbers of breeding-duck pairs, will likely also be the places most critical to maintaining continental waterfowl populations in an uncertain future.

Prairie Potholes Region↗
USGS2016

Extremes of heat, drought and precipitation depress reproductive performance in shortgrass prairie passerines

Climate change elevates conservation concerns worldwide because it is likely to exacerbate many identified threats to animal populations. In recent decades, grassland birds have declined faster than other North American bird species, a loss thought to be due to habitat loss and fragmentation and changing agricultural practices. Climate change poses additional threats of unknown magnitude to these already declining populations. We examined how seasonal and daily weather conditions over 10 years influenced nest survival of five species of insectivorous passerines native to the shortgrass prairie and evaluate our findings relative to future climate predictions for this region. Daily nest survival ( n = 870) was best predicted by a combination of daily and seasonal weather variables, age of nest, time in season and bird habitat guild. Within a season, survival rates were lower on very hot days (temperatures ≥ 35 °C), on dry days (with a lag of 1 day) and on stormy days (especially for those species nesting in shorter vegetation). Across years, survival rates were also lower during warmer and drier breeding seasons. Clutch sizes were larger when early spring temperatures were cool and the week prior to egg-laying was wetter and warming. Climate change is likely to exacerbate grassland bird population declines because projected climate conditions include rising temperatures, more prolonged drought and more intense storms as the hydrological cycle is altered. Under varying realistic scenarios, nest success estimates were halved compared to their current average value when models both increased the temperature (3 °C) and decreased precipitation (two additional dry days during a nesting period), thus underscoring a sense of urgency in identifying and addressing the current causes of range-wide declines.

Ibis↗
USGS2016

The relative contribution of climate to changes in lesser prairie-chicken abundance

Managing for species using current weather patterns fails to incorporate the uncertainty associated with future climatic conditions; without incorporating potential changes in climate into conservation strategies, management and conservation efforts may fall short or waste valuable resources. Understanding the effects of climate change on species in the Great Plains of North America is especially important, as this region is projected to experience an increased magnitude of climate change. Of particular ecological and conservation interest is the lesser prairie-chicken ( Tympanuchus pallidicinctus ), which was listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in May 2014. We used Bayesian hierarchical models to quantify the effects of extreme climatic events (extreme values of the Palmer Drought Severity Index [PDSI]) relative to intermediate (changes in El Niño Southern Oscillation) and long-term climate variability (changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) on trends in lesser prairie-chicken abundance from 1981 to 2014. Our results indicate that lesser prairie-chicken abundance on leks responded to environmental conditions of the year previous by positively responding to wet springs (high PDSI) and negatively to years with hot, dry summers (low PDSI), but had little response to variation in the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Additionally, greater variation in abundance on leks was explained by variation in site relative to broad-scale climatic indices. Consequently, lesser prairie-chicken abundance on leks in Kansas is more strongly influenced by extreme drought events during summer than other climatic conditions, which may have negative consequences for the population as drought conditions intensify throughout the Great Plains.

Ecosphere↗
USGS2015

Scale-appropriate adaptation strategies and actions in the Northeast and Midwest United States

Climate Change Adaptation is a growing field within conservation and natural resource management. Actions taken toward climate change adaptation account for climate impacts and ecological responses, both current and projected into the future. These actions attempt to accomplish a number of goals, including the conservation of wildlife and ecosystems by reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience. Climate change adaptation strategies and approaches for natural resources can be thought of as part of a continuum of potential actions ranging from 1) options or goals to 2) strategies, 3) approaches, and 4) tactics. There are a range of decision support tools and processes to aid climate change adaptation. This document highlights several including the Adaptation Workbook, Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments, Structured Decision Making, Adaptive Resource Management, and Scenario Planning. It will also provide case studies on the application of these tools across the Northeast and Midwest. Improved, better-integrated, and increasingly coordinated monitoring systems would be helpful to detect, track, and attribute species and habitat shifts to climate change over spatiotemporal scales. We highlight regional examples of projects and programs addressing these challenges. Illustrative case studies of climate change adaptation efforts are presented across landscape/ecoregion, state, and local scales. Appendix 4.1 provides a synthesis of over 900 general, species and habitat-specific adaptation strategies and tactics from 9 regional studies being considered or implemented across the region. The study of climate change adaptation is a relatively new and rapidly growing field focused on preparing for and responding to the current and future impacts of climate change. The goal of this chapter is to highlight different approaches, processes, and tools currently being used across the region through illustrative case studies at varying scales. In addition, we provide a synthesis of numerous species and habitat-specific adaptation strategies and actions from existing assessment reports and management plans, which is intended to showcase a range of possibilities for natural resource management under future global change. This report does not prescribe one specific approach to taking action; instead, we outline a range of adaptation 5 tactics, which will require thoughtful consideration of the needs of the species, habitat, and location, the stakeholders and partners involved, the scale that a decision or policy is being implemented at, and the financial and personnel resources available to managers.

Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ke↗
USGS2024

Managing ecosystems with resist-accept-direct (RAD)

In recent years considerable interest has been generated in a new approach known as resist – accept – direct , or RAD, for managing ecosystems in the face of climate change. Under RAD, strategic responses to climate change are described in terms of three broad categories: resisting climate transformation, accepting the transformation and continuing to manage as best one can, and directing the transformed system toward novel ecological conditions. In particular, the potential for integrating RAD and adaptive management has been broadly considered, though absent a decision-making framework needed for implementation. We propose a hierarchical decision scheme for RAD that accounts for strategy selection among the three RAD options, as well as adaptive decision making within each option. We use stochastic models and uncertainties about ecosystem processes to account for the dynamics of climate-transformed ecosystems, and show how these features can be used to inform RAD strategies. Operationally, the approach involves decisions at two levels: one level involves choosing a policy for each strategy, and the second level involves deciding which strategy has the greatest policy value. The structure described here extends recent work in climate change adaptation, by including Markovian decisions under climate change, strategy-specific policies, and value functions for assessing and selecting RAD strategies. We provide a hierarchical accounting of decisions and responses, and develop rules for the timing of those decisions. Combining RAD and adaptive management can help to organize thinking about ecological conservation under climate change, and focus attention on mechanisms for making decisions. We believe the structure presented here can facilitate conservation efforts under the non-stationary climate conditions we are sure to face for the foreseeable future.

Methods in Ecology and Evolution↗
USGS2023

Impacts and uncertainties of climate-induced changes in watershed inputs on estuarine hypoxia

Multiple climate-driven stressors, including warming and increased nutrient delivery, are exacerbating hypoxia in coastal marine environments. Within coastal watersheds, environmental managers are particularly interested in climate impacts on terrestrial processes, which may undermine the efficacy of management actions designed to reduce eutrophication and consequent low-oxygen conditions in receiving coastal waters. However, substantial uncertainty accompanies the application of Earth system model (ESM) projections to a regional modeling framework when quantifying future changes to estuarine hypoxia due to climate change. In this study, two downscaling methods are applied to multiple ESMs and used to force two independent watershed models for Chesapeake Bay, a large coastal-plain estuary of the eastern United States. The projected watershed changes are then used to force a coupled 3-D hydrodynamic–biogeochemical estuarine model to project climate impacts on hypoxia, with particular emphasis on projection uncertainties. Results indicate that all three factors (ESM, downscaling method, and watershed model) are found to contribute substantially to the uncertainty associated with future hypoxia, with the choice of ESM being the largest contributor. Overall, in the absence of management actions, there is a high likelihood that climate change impacts on the watershed will expand low-oxygen conditions by 2050 relative to a 1990s baseline period; however, the projected increase in hypoxia is quite small (4 %) because only climate-induced changes in watershed inputs are considered and not those on the estuary itself. Results also demonstrate that the attainment of established nutrient reduction targets will reduce annual hypoxia by about 50 % compared to the 1990s. Given these estimates, it is virtually certain that fully implemented management actions reducing excess nutrient loadings will outweigh hypoxia increases driven by climate-induced changes in terrestrial runoff.

Maryland, Virginia↗
USGS1997

Orbital forcing of deep-sea benthic species diversity

Explanations for the temporal and spatial patterns of species biodiversity focus on stability-time, disturbance-mosaic (biogenic microhabitat heterogeneity) and competition-predation (biotic interactions) hypotheses. The stability-time hypothesis holds that high species diversity in the deep sea and in the tropics reflects long-term climatic stability. But the influence of climate change on deep-sea diversity has not been studied and recent evidence suggests that deep-sea environments undergo changes in climatically driven temperature and flux of nutrients and organic-carbon during glacial-interglacial cycles. Here we show that Pliocene (2.85-2.40 Myr) deep-sea North Atlantic benthic ostracod (Crustacea) species diversity is related to solar insolation changes caused by 41,000-yr cycles of Earth's obliquity (tilt). Temporal changes in diversity, as measured by the Shannon- Weiner index, H(S), correlate with independent climate indicators of benthic foraminiferal oxygen-isotope ratios (mainly ice volume) and ostracod Mg:Ca ratios (bottomwater temperature). During glacial periods, H(S) = 0.2-0.6, whereas during interglacials, H(S) = 1.2-1.6, which is three to four times as high. The control of deep-sea benthic diversity by cyclic climate change at timescales of 103-104 yr does not support the stability-time hypothesis because it shows that the deep sea is a temporally dynamic environment. Diversity oscillations reflect large-scale response of the benthic community to climatically driven changes in either thermohaline circulation, bottom temperature (or temperature-related factors) and food, and a coupling of benthic diversity to surface productivity.

Nature↗
USGS2021

Vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning for projected changes in water quality and quantity for protected areas in the upper Midwest

Climate change and the extreme weather associated with it can be a major challenge to natural resource managers charged with the protection, restoration, recovery, and management of wetlands and wildlife habitats. Forecasting the potential impacts of climate changes will be important for decision-makers and land managers seeking to minimize impacts to habitats, infrastructure, and wildlife populations and prepare for the future. In collaboration with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) managers, we developed a climate change vulnerability assessment to spatially evaluate climate vulnerabilities across the Midwest region. To create the vulnerability assessment, we convened resource managers and scientists working across the region to determine the components and scope of the vulnerability assessment. The vulnerability assessment was watershed-based and composed of 15 indicators of climate change and five indicators that reflect the capacity of a watershed to buffer against the effects of climate change. The indicators were selected by FWS managers to have broad applicability across systems and programs in the FWS. To facilitate usability, we created an online application that allows users to generate customizable vulnerability assessments. We then integrated the assessment into a process for engaging in climate change adaptation thinking as a precursor to formal planning, implementation, and monitoring of adaptation actions. The process we designed focused on understanding the components of the system, assessing climate change vulnerabilities, creating and describing possible climate change scenarios, and identifying impacts and adaptation options for each scenario. We piloted this process in a virtual workshop setting with FWS managers and biologists on the topic of managed wetland systems. This work is currently being used by the FWS to better understand regional vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies and to advance integration of climate science into formal planning processes.

Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Miss↗
USGS2015

Climate-smart management of biodiversity

Determining where biodiversity is likely to be most vulnerable to climate change and methods to reduce that vulnerability are necessary first steps to incorporate climate change into biodiversity management plans. Here, we use a spatial climate change vulnerability assessment to (1) map the potential vulnerability of terrestrial biodiversity to climate change in the northeastern United States and (2) provide guidance on how and where management actions for biodiversity could provide long-term benefits under climate change (i.e., climate-smart management considerations). Our model suggests that biodiversity will be most vulnerable in Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia due to the combination of high climate change velocity, high landscape resistance, and high topoclimate homogeneity. Biodiversity is predicted to be least vulnerable in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire because large portions of these states have low landscape resistance, low climate change velocity, and low topoclimate homogeneity. Our spatial climate-smart management considerations suggest that: (1) high topoclimate diversity could moderate the effects of climate change across 50% of the region; (2) decreasing local landscape resistance in conjunction with other management actions could increase the benefit of those actions across 17% of the region; and (3) management actions across 24% of the region could provide long-term benefits by promoting short-term population persistence that provides a source population capable of moving in the future. The guidance and framework we provide here should allow conservation organizations to incorporate our climate-smart management considerations into management plans without drastically changing their approach to biodiversity conservation.

Ecosphere↗
USGS2019

Climate adaptation Science Centers—Annual report for 2018

2018 marked the 10-year anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center! With the passage of the fiscal year 2018 budget on March 23, 2018, our program name was changed from the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center to the National Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCASC). The eight regional Department of the Interior (DOI) Climate Science Centers were renamed Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs). The name changes more clearly align the national and regional centers and emphasize their focus on meeting natural resource adaptation needs. Although the program has a new name, our mission has not changed. We are still hard at work delivering science to help fish, wildlife, water, land, and people adapt to a changing climate. During the past 10 years, the NCASC and the eight regional CASCs funded over 425 science projects and built a network of research partners, resource management stakeholders, interdisciplinary staff, fellows, and early career researchers. In celebration of our work and accomplishments over the last 10 years, the NCASC began a monthly web post series on “10 Things You May Not Know” about topics our science has focused on, including drought, glaciers, and wildfire. Additionally, CASCs that had completed their initial hosting agreement with the USGS underwent a formal review and recompetition process. New hosting agreements were awarded to the Southwest and North Central CASCs in 2018. Read the 2018 annual report to learn more about the CASCs' great science, partnerships, capacity building, and more from 2018.

Open-File Report↗
USGS2022

Voluntary Guidance for States to Incorporate Climate Adaptation in State Wildlife Action Plans and Other Management Plans

The Voluntary Guidance for States to Incorporate Climate Adaptation into State Wildlife Actions Plans and other Management Plans aims to help state fish and wildlife agencies incorporate climate change adaptation for fish and wildlife and their habitats into State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) and other natural resource management plans. This update to the original 2009 Voluntary Guidance reflects the advancements in climate science and in our understanding and implementation of climate adaptation developed over the past 13 years. The document provides principles and tools that can be used to plan for and implement climate change adaptation, voluntary guidance for incorporating climate change into the existing required elements of SWAPs, and case studies to demonstrate adaptation strategies deployed by states in their management efforts. Climate change continues to be a significant issue for wildlife and natural systems and for the people who rely on the ecosystem services they provide. There is now a well-established and growing scientific literature on the impacts of climate change on wildlife and their habitats, including climate-driven range shifts, population changes, and even species extinctions. At the same time, efforts to address climate change impacts can be made in cooperation with efforts to address other threats, including habitat loss/fragmentation from development, introduction of invasive species, water pollution, and wildlife diseases, many of which may be exacerbated by climate change. Since climate change is a complex and often politically charged issue, it is understood that the decision to revise SWAPs, or other plans, to address climate change rests solely with each state fish and wildlife agency. All states are required to update their SWAPs by 2025 to qualify for federal funding. Although consideration of climate change is not a requirement for this revision of SWAPs, assessing the impacts of climate change and identifying species and habitats vulnerable to those impacts can help states meet the required eight elements for the revision and prepare for funding opportunities that can support climate adaptation efforts. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, if passed by the Senate, would provide billions of dollars to states to implement SWAPs, including addressing climate change impacts on fish and wildlife. The Voluntary Guidance Document introduces and explains seven overarching principles for incorporating climate adaptation into SWAPs. These principles (found in Chapter 2) are: 1. Fully integrate climate change into SWAPs 2. Adopt forward-looking goals 3. Explicitly link actions to climate vulnerabilities 4. Manage for change, not just persistence 5. Consider broader landscapes and longer timeframes 6. Address uncertainty by considering future scenarios and use of adaptive management 7. Engage diverse partners with climate experience and expertise

Report↗
USGS2014

Tribal engagement strategy of the South Central Climate Science Center, 2014

The South Central Climate Science Center was established by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012 to increase understanding of climate change and coordinate an effective response to climate-change effects on Native American tribes and natural and cultural resources that the Department manages. The eight regional Climate Science Centers of the U.S. Department of the Interior work closely with natural-resource management agencies, university researchers, and others such as tribes and private landowners on climate-change issues. The relatively large number of Native Americans in the south central United States and their special knowledge of changing ecosystems make working with tribes and tribal members on climate-change issues particularly important in this part of the Nation. This circular describes priorities of the South Central Climate Science Center and provides information about resources available from Climate Science Centers and partner agencies regarding climate change. The circular also describes how this Climate Science Center, tribes and tribal members, and others can collaborate to minimize potential harmful effects of climate change on human society and our surrounding ecosystems.

Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas↗
USGS2019

Final Report for Phase 1 - USGS-NE CSC and USFS-NRS Cooperative Research on Climate-Vulnerable Habitats and Species in the Northeast

The US Forest Service (USFS) and Northeast Climate (Adaptation) Science Center (NE CASC) came together to focus research and management cooperation on the topic of the impacts of climate change on forested ecosystems. This work had 3 primary components: 1) modeling headwater stream refugia; 2) investigating resilience and resistance strategies for New England forests; and 3) studying the impact of climate change on forest mammal communities. USFS and NE CASC organizations have complimentary expertise to share in order to improve natural resource management in the critical montane and headwater habitats in the region, and worked together to use this expertise in advancing science and science support for natural resource adaptation to a changing climate. This work resulted in increased understanding of the direct, indirect, and interactive responses of at-risk coldwater, montane and northern species to a changing climate; 2) the development of approaches and strategies for adaptation, including identification of potential climate refugia; and 3) interactive platforms for data, models and forecasts to communicate these and related results to the conservation and management community.

Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ke↗
USGS2025

Mountain sentinels in a changing world: Review and conservation implications of weather and climate effects on mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus)

Climate change is occurring at an accelerated rate in high-elevation alpine and mountain ecosystems. Cold-adapted, mountain species are at risk due to forecasted change and knowledge is needed to respond to current and future conservation challenges. Mountain goats ( Oreamnos americanus ) are an iconic species of North American mountain cultures and landscapes, and due to specialized adaptations for life in cold, mountainous environments they are particularly sensitive to changes in weather and climate. As sentinels of change in alpine ecosystems, the study of mountain goats offers insight into the ecological effects and conservation challenges associated with climate change in these sensitive and biodiverse environments. Here, we synthesize existing knowledge about how climate change is expected to influence environmental conditions experienced by mountain goats and associated mechanistic changes to behavior, nutritional ecology, demography, health, and interspecific interactions. In many instances, climate change effects are likely to be negative and additive to existing threats (such as human disturbance, hunting, disease, predation) though benefits are expected in some cases. Changes in climate and mountain environments will necessitate re-examination and modification of population monitoring, management, and conservation strategies. Specifically, spatiotemporal (and other) aspects of monitoring and management may need to be adjusted to accommodate emerging and novel conservation challenges. Yet, key data and knowledge gaps remain and should be addressed to advance conservation and decision-making capabilities. For mountain goats and similarly climate-sensitive alpine herbivores, effective conservation will ultimately benefit from collaborations among diverse networks guided by well-planned, strategic visions focused on common ground – namely the resiliency and persistence of culturally and ecologically significant mountain species and the alpine environment they inhabit.

Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana,↗