Project

Connecting people, nature, and science is at the core of the mission of the US Department of the Interior. The National Park Service is playing a leading role in that mission in 2016 by hosting a national BioBlitz on May 20-21 that will have people nationwide recording observations of plants and animals in over 100 national parks. This two-day Citizen Science event will provide outreach and education opportunities for new and previous park visitors to document biodiversity, along with NPS staff and other partners. Furthermore for the first time in BioBlitz history, participants will enter species observations including digital photos into iNaturalist, making observations instantly viewable and organized into a single, geo-referenced database. This event thus provides an unprecedented look at the intersection of biodiversity and people in parks across the country during the same time period

Project

Consistent and accurate landscape datasets are important foundational products for ecological analyses and for understanding and anticipating the effects of climate change on forested, agricultural, and freshwater systems across the U.S. and Canada. The objective of this project was to extend an existing terrestrial habitat map of the north Atlantic U.S. to Atlantic Canada and southern Quebec, using and modeling field-collected data combined with national and provincial datasets. This GIS map 1) provides a foundation upon which further research, such as species vulnerability analyses, can advance, 2) allows each relevant state and province to identify terrestrial habitats consistently across borders, 3) allows for analysis of regional connectivity, and 4) facilitates an understanding of terrestrial animal and plant populations in relation to climate change. The map can be viewed here:  http://maps.tnc

NE Habitat Map Screenshot _0.png
Project

Climate change poses a variety of threats to biodiversity. Most efforts to assess the likely impacts of climate change on biodiversity try to rank species based on their vulnerability under changed environmental conditions. These efforts have generally not considered the ability of organisms to adjust their phenotype to the changing environment. Organisms can do this one of two ways. First, they can adjust their phenotype via non-evolutionary pathways. Second, they can undergo adaptive evolutionary change. We used two interconnected approaches to evaluate thermal adaptation capacity in a cold-water fish species. 1) Using tagging data, we estimated thermal performance curves for wild fish. The curves indicate how fish body growth will respond to changing temperatures. 2) Using genomic approaches, we developed a unified single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panel for use across the species’ range to examine adaptive capacity

Genesee River, New York: Credit: Alan Cressler
Project

This research identified opportunities to manage flows, connections, and landscapes to increase the resilience of human communities and ecosystems. This research identified dynamic and adaptive solutions to managing river flows that allow continued provision of valuable infrastructure services such as flood control, hydropower, and water supply, while also supporting thriving river ecosystems - both today and into the future. The research is directly responsive to the NECSC’s FY15 Science Theme 3: Climate impacts on freshwater resources and ecosystems, Priority 1: Effects of Climate Change on Hydrologic Regimes, Ecological Flows, and Aquatic Connectivity

Project

A statistical downscaling method (bias-correction and spatial disaggregation: BCSD) is applied to general circulation models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to generate high-resolution downscaled precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature estimates under historical and three future emission scenarios over the Northeastern United States

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