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Water laws and drought plans are used to prioritize and allocate scarce water resources. Both have historically been human-centric, failing to account for non-human water needs. In this paper, we examine the development of instream flow legislation and the evolution of drought planning to highlight the growing concern for the non-human impacts of water scarcity. Utilizing a new framework for ecological drought, we analyzed five watershed-scale drought plans in southwestern Montana, USA to understand if, and how, the ecological impacts of drought are currently being assessed. We found that while these plans do account for some ecological impacts, it is primarily through the narrow lens of impacts to fish as measured...
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Management and disturbances have significant effects on grassland forage production. When using satellite remote sensing to monitor climate impacts such as drought stress on annual forage production, minimizing these effects provides a clearer climate signal in the productivity data. The research objectives are to (1) estimate biomass expected at a certain location under specific weather conditions, (2) determine which drought indices explain the majority of inter-annual variability in the study area and (3) develop a model that estimates annual biomass early in the growing season. This study uses an established methodology to determine an expected ecosystem performance (EEP) in the Nebraska Sandhills, USA, representing...
Tags: NDVI,
Nebraska,
Sandhills,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
United States, All tags...
biomass,
biota,
drought,
farming,
forage production,
rangeland productivity,
regression tree,
remote sensing, Fewer tags
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Management and disturbances have significant effects on grassland forage production. When using satellite remote sensing to monitor climate impacts such as drought stress on annual forage production, minimizing these effects provides a clearer climate signal in the productivity data. The use of an ecosystem performance approach for assessment of seasonal and interannual climate impacts on forage production in semi-arid grasslands proved to be a successful method in a case study covering the Nebraska Sandhills. In this study we developed a time series (2000-2018) of the Expected Ecosystem Performance (EEP), which serves as a proxy for annual forage production after accounting for non-climatic influences, while minimizing...
Categories: Data;
Types: Downloadable,
GeoTIFF,
Map Service,
Raster;
Tags: Land Use Change,
NDVI,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
United States,
biomass, All tags...
biota,
drought impact,
droughts,
ecosystem management,
farming,
forage production,
rangeland productivity,
regression analysis,
regression tree model,
remote sensing,
semi-arid grasslands,
terrestrial ecosystems,
western U.S., Fewer tags
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Water laws and drought plans are used to prioritize and allocate scarce water resources. Both have historically been human-centric, failing to account for non-human water needs. In this paper, we examine the development of instream flow legislation and the evolution of drought planning to highlight the growing concern for the non-human impacts of water scarcity. Utilizing a new framework for ecological drought, we analyzed five watershed-scale drought plans in southwestern Montana, USA to understand if, and how, the ecological impacts of drought are currently being assessed. We found that while these plans do account for some ecological impacts, it is primarily through the narrow lens of impacts to fish as measured...
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High interannual variability of forage production in semi-arid grasslands leads to uncertainties when livestock producers make decisions such as buying additional feed, relocating animals, or using flexible stocking. Within-season predictions of annual forage production (i.e., yearly production) can provide specific boundaries for producers to make these decisions with more information and possibly with higher confidence. We use a recently developed forage production model, ForageAhead, that uses environmental and seasonal climate variables to estimate the annual forage production approximated by remotely sensed vegetation data. The model uses observed seasonal climate data from winter and spring as an input together...
Tags: Annual forage production,
Colorado,
Ecology,
Flexible stocking,
Forage model, All tags...
Forage prediction,
ForageAhead,
Idaho,
Kansas,
Montana,
Nebraska,
Nevada,
New Mexico,
North Dakota,
Oklahoma,
Range decision making,
Rangeland Ecology,
Remote Sensing,
Seasonal scenarios,
South Dakota,
Summer climate scenarios,
Texas,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
Utah,
Wyoming, Fewer tags
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