| parts | | type | Technical Summary |
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| value | Dozens of national parks across the country have engaged in climate change scenario planning in recent years, exploring the application of this technique to support management decisions in the face of variability and uncertainty in a rapidly changing environment. Simultaneously, the National Park Service (NPS) has developed a new streamlined approach to guiding prioritization of a park’s long-term investments in resource stewardship, known as a Resource Stewardship Strategy (RSS). Development of an RSS occurs during one or two workshops, during which staff must assess all available information about the condition of, and threats to, park resources and determine priority management strategies and actions. Observed trends, projections, and projected effects of climate change are assessed as part of this work and must be considered as one of the many influences evaluated. Consequently, NPS is developing a structured, repeatable approach for providing climate projections and scenarios to inform RSS development. This servicewide planning initiative presents a valuable opportunity for the NPS to collaborate with staff of the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) and build on work recently completed in the northern Great Plains. Our team has identified two opportunities to facilitate management application of, and to extend knowledge gained from, our previous NC CSC work: 1) Develop a management-relevant and manager-accessible publication and resource brief to support short-term planning at Badlands NP and in surrounding federal and tribal lands and lay the groundwork for future RSS development at the park; and 2) Pilot a process for integrating more robust scenario planning and climate science into NPS RSSs by collaborating on the upcoming RSS development for nearby Devils Tower NM. 1) In our earlier work, we made substantial strides in combining qualitative and quantitative scenarios, which stretched manager thinking about the range of possible future conditions, highlighted important management tradeoffs, and identified remaining information needs. Because the team’s scientists and adaptation specialists collaborated closely with resource managers in the development of a simulation model specific to the region and its key resource questions, as well as in interpreting its output, the managers understand and appreciate the model’s implications. However, documenting the voluminous and multifaceted results of the modeling is necessary for their longevity and translation into future planning efforts. Therefore, we will publish the modeling results in a comprehensive, peer-reviewed article and distill them into a management-relevant resource brief. 2) The NPS RSS program will develop RSSs for all NPS units in coming years. The RSS effort thus represents a critical opportunity to ‘mainstream’ climate considerations into park planning servicewide. The NPS Climate Change Response Program (CCRP) typically provides guidance on climate change considerations, including park-specific climate projections and potential resource impacts, as well as methods for planning under uncertainty using principles of scenario planning. For most parks, this is a first and necessarily brief experience with scenarios and scenario planning, and therefore CCRP typically shares just two climate scenarios that bound a range of possible climate changes and resource impacts. Participants are encouraged to develop long- and short-term resource goals and management activities that explicitly consider this range of possible future conditions, in what is effectively a “lite” form of scenario planning. The opportunity to explore the integration of more robust climate-change scenario planning into the RSS process for Devils Tower NM has the potential to benefit many other national park units interested in planning to address future impacts of climate change. We will intensively weave scenario thinking and climate science into the RSS of Devils Tower NM, an NPS unit with a strong interest in climate change assessment and adaptation, and fully document the process and lessons learned as a model for other NPS units to refine and replicate. Our work, which focuses on translating existing climate science and incorporating it into an established planning process for two parks, seeks to accomplish two larger capacity-building goals: 1) continue developing the NC CSC-NPS science-manager partnership to foster understanding of “client” needs so that the CSC can continue to provide management-relevant science, and 2) develop a repeatable methodology that the NPS can use to better incorporate scenarios and climate science into RSSs. |
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