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The Climate Change Response Framework is an example of a collaborative, cross-boundary approach to create a set of tools, partnerships, and actions to support climate-informed conservation and land management. Historically, this effort has focused on the needs of forest managers and forestry professionals. In recent years, however, there has been increasing demand for science and tools to address climate change adaptation in wildlife management and conservation. Not only do wildlife and resource managers need the best available science, it must also be presented in a usable format with feasible options within the purview of an individual manager. The research team first completed a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed studies to summarize what wildlife-related management actions currently exist in climate change adaptation. They then developed and tested a “menu” of climate change adaptation actions that are suitable for wildlife management in terrestrial ecosystems

White-Tailed Deer
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Global mean sea level rise of ~3 mm/year during the last decade was likely the highest rate since 1900, and continues to accelerate. It is therefore critical that coastal communities begin to develop adaptive responses to changing shorelines. We will update local sea level rise projections along the Northeast US coastline using a probabilistic model of future sea level distribution, combined with analysis of local trends and extreme sea level events from tide gauge records, to create regionally-appropriate projections. A similar approach has already been successfully implemented for the state of Massachusetts. This project builds on previous work to improve the scale and continuity of the ice-sheet analysis, and spatially extending the framework to assess the vulnerability of the entire Northeast coastline

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The northeastern U.S. is highly exposed to climate change; in fact, the rate of change is higher than most places on earth (Karmalkar and Bradley 2017). The forests of the Northeast CASC region, and the wildlife that inhabit them, are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.  In particular, the boreal forests, a biome that reaches from Alaska to the Northeast, and the northern hardwoods, including sugar maple and paper birch, are expected to be intolerant of climate warming. Likewise, many of the birds, mammals, amphibians, fish, and insects that inhabit these forest ecosystems are at their southern range edges here and are considered sensitive to climate change. Furthermore, local species’ adaptive capacity is limited by habitat fragmentation, high rates of invasive species, and other stressors. There is considerable uncertainty with respect to the magnitude and direction of future changes, particularly with respect to interactions with changes in land use and land management, as well as novel interactions amongst co-occurring species. Thus, a focus on climate adaptation in northern forest ecosystems, including evaluations of the impacts of particular actions, is critical. 

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Our National Parks are vulnerable to climate change in a number of ways, requiring changes in the way we manage our parks.  This project uses decision support tools (e.g., scenario planning, vulnerability assessments) and climate science to help park managers adapt their management practices to climate change. Park managers are asking what changes they can expect that uniquely affect their park and to what degree.  With this information, they can use Scenario Planning and other decision support tools to consider new management strategies or modifications to existing strategies that help the park face these climatic changes.  Other parks need to first identify which of their assets (e.g., natural resources, infrastructure, etc) are vulnerable to climate change, in which case they also need to know how the climate is changing unique to their park in order to conduct a climate change vulnerability assessment

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

Increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases have caused global warming, resulting in considerable shifts in ecosystem function and structure, particularly in sensitive cold climates like the Arctic. As the Arctic continues to warm, the ground thaws and permafrost degrades, resulting in changes to shrub communities. These changes can cause northern tundra soils, which have twice as much below ground carbon (C) as atmospheric carbon, to shift from sinks to sources of C. The fate of this large C pool may be driven not only by climatic conditions, but also by ecosystem changes brought about by arctic animal populations. For example, grazing, burrowing, and defecating are expected to alter nutrients and soil decomposition, although this area of research has not been well explored. In this project I will quantify the effects of arctic ground squirrels, Urocitellus parryii, activity on soil respiration and other characteristics in interior Alaska

Project

The field of climate adaptation is still getting established, and guidelines and examples for how to manage for climate change on-the-ground are still rare. The concept of climate change refugia, areas buffered from climate change that enable persistence of valued resources, is being discussed as a potential adaptation option in the face of anthropogenic climate change. This project seeks to provide practical guidance for how to operationalize this concept and to work with stakeholders to help prioritize actions to conserve climate change refugia. In addition, I use the tools of ecological and climate modeling and historical field data to test predictions of climate change refugia in the Sierra Nevada of California. Many resource managers and conservation organizations are looking to help their ecosystems, habitats and species adapt to climate change.  Climate change refugia can allow species to persist in the face of warming and changing precipitation regimes

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This project is using a combination of long-term data records and recently established large-scale adaptive management studies in managed forests across the Lake States, New England, Intermountain West, and Black Hills to identify forest management strategies and forest conditions that confer the greatest levels of resistance and resilience to past and emerging stressors and their relevance in addressing future global change.  This work represents a broad partnership between scientists from the USFS Northern Research Station, USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, USGS, University of MN,  University of Maine, and Dartmouth College in an effort to capitalize on over 50 years of data collection on USFS Experimental Forests and Forest Inventory and Analysis plot to evaluate forest adaptation strategies

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This project aimed to quantify the range in variability in forest dynamics and climate responses for range-margin populations of Pinus banksiana and Picea mariana so as to generate management guidelines for conserving these forests on the landscape in an uncertain climatic future.  These species are the cornerstone for several upland and lowland habitat types on the western edge of the Northeast CSC and are particularly vulnerable to future changes in climate and disturbance regimes.  This project took advantage of extensive dendrochronological and forest community data to determine the drivers and future dynamics of key demographic processes for these tree species

Project

A reconnaissance study distinguishes coastal areas of the northeastern U.S. (approx. Virginia to Maine) that will experience an inundation-dominated response to sea-level rise from those that will respond dynamically due to physical and bio-physical sedimentation and erosion processes. Areas that will be dominated by inundation include urban regions of intense development and/or coastal engineering, as well as bedrock coasts. Areas that will respond dynamically include beaches, unconsolidated cliffs, barrier islands, and wetlands. Distinguishing which processes are relevant to sea-level rise impacts in these areas aids prioritization of scientific research and decision support efforts. Also see Dr. Robert Thieler's A Research and Decision Support Framework to Evaluate Sea-level Rise Impacts in the Northeastern U.S. Tools and Products Sea Level Rise Viewer https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr

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