Natural resource management requires decision making in the face of uncertain future conditions. Climate change has been identified by our partnership as a high-priority threat to grasslands and all of our priority habitats, affecting water availability, species composition, species interactions, phenology, and other factors. Climate change is understood to be a factor in nearly all natural resource issues, but managers find it difficult to plan for climate change because of high levels of uncertainty. Multiple Global Climate Models (GCMs), CO2 emission scenarios, downscaling methods, and combinations of these compound our uncertainty. Natural resource managers need a simple way to evaluate climate-driven changes based on a tangible outcome: effects on species and their habitats. Climate change effects on landcover emerged as a high-priority need from the PLJV’s Grasslands LCD Pilot work and will be equally important for expanding LCD throughout the GPLCC geography and across habitat types. Although climate change is understood to be a key uncertainty affecting landowners and other resource managers, we lack consistent information about how it will impact our species and their habitats. By targeting climate change modeling to specifically project changes in land cover datasets that are already in use by LCC cooperators, we create land cover projections that can be directly incorporated into LCD-based models. The proposed study is a partner-driven, cooperative approach that will result in tangible datasets that enhance and expand the GPLCC’s existing investments in LCD and the Southern Great Plains Rapid Ecological Assessment (REA). The study builds on core competencies in climate science (USGS EROS - Earth Resources Observation and Science Center; South Central Climate Science Center consortium members), ecological modeling and REAs (USGS Fort Collins Science Center), Landscape Design (PLJV), and ground-based ecological expertise (Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Oklahoma Biological Survey, Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation) to ensure a process and a product that is both scientifically credible and directly relevant to GPLCC land managers.
