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One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. To help federal land managers address this need, the North Central CASC has been working with the National Park Service to pioneer an approach for incorporating climate science and scenario planning into NPS planning processes, in particular Resource Stewardship Strategies (RSS). These strategies serve as a long-range planning tool for a national park unit to achieve its desired natural and cultural resource conditions, and are used to guide a park’s full spectrum of resource-specific management plans and day-to-day management activities. To support adaptation planning within...
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Tribal resource managers in the southwest U.S. are facing a host of challenges related to environmental change, including increasing temperatures, longer periods of drought, and invasive species. These threats are exacerbating the existing challenges of managing complex ecosystems. In a rapidly changing environment, resource managers need powerful tools and the most complete information to make the most effective decisions possible. Traditional Ecological Knowledge has enabled Indigenous peoples to adaptively manage and thrive in diverse environments for thousands of years, yet it is generally underutilized and undervalued, particularly in the context of western scientific approaches. Traditional Ecological...
This webinar was recorded on May 7, 2015. Sustainable management of natural resources under competing demands is challenging, particularly when faced with novel and uncertain future climatic conditions. Meeting this challenge requires the consideration of information about the effects of management, disturbance, land use, and climate change on ecosystems. State-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) provide a flexible framework for integrating landscape processes and comparing alternative management scenarios, but incorporating climate change is an active area of research. In this presentation, three researchers present work funded by Climate Science Centers across the country to incorporate climate projections...
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Climate change is poised to alter natural systems, the frequency of extreme weather, and human health and livelihoods. In order to effectively prepare for and respond to these challenges in the north-central region of the U.S., people must have the knowledge and tools to develop plans and adaptation strategies. The objective of this project was to build stakeholders’ capacity to respond to climate change in the north-central U.S., filling in gaps not covered by other projects in the region. During the course of this project, researchers focused on three major activities: Tribal Capacity Building: Researchers provided tribal colleges and universities with mini-grants to develop student projects to document climate-related...
Field estimates of the abundance of rainbow trout in Washington and British Columbia were collected in concert with environmental DNA samples (eDNA) to evaluate if eDNA copy numbers correlated with abundance of trout. In addition, stream habitat data including channel units (pools, riffles), substrate, large woody debris, among others, were collected at sites.
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One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, or how climate change effects will unfold. In order to plan for this uncertain future, managers have begun to use a tool known as scenario planning, in which climate models are used to identify different plausible climate conditions, known as “scenarios”, for a particular area. In a previous project, researchers with the North Central Climate Science Center worked with natural resource managers at Badlands National Park and on surrounding federal lands to model how different climate scenarios and management activities would impact the area’s resources. The model that was developed answers critical “what if” questions...
Field estimates of the abundance of two trout species (bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout) in Montana and rainbow trout in Washington and British Columbia were collected in concert with environmental DNA samples (eDNA) to evaluate if eDNA copy numbers correlated with abundance of trout. In addition, stream habitat data including channel units (pools, riffles), substrate, large woody debris, among others, were collected at sites.
The dataset includes measurements of stream habitat, fish abundance of westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout, and species-specific measures of environmental DNA (eDNA) from within the water. The data covers multiple streams in western Montana.
In addition to the major projects funded by the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC), selected through its solicitation process or the directed funds going to the foundational Science Areas, there remains a need within the north central domain to support work that builds capacity among stakeholders that have been otherwise left out of the major projects funded by the NC CSC. During the course of this project, we focused on stakeholder capacity building by providing regional offerings of climate-related courses for resource managers, supporting tribal college students and deploying technology to better understand how climate impacts living things, and supporting strategic scientific study of the climate/energy/environment...
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The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in 94 units, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to address potential future effects of management practices and climate change. The goal of this project is to outline the steps required for developing NPS grazing management plans, to identify information needs and availability for these planning processes, and to initiate a scenario-based pilot project for meeting these needs at a given park unit. This will serve as an important step toward developing a transferable process to help parks ensure that grazing management practices...
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The bison, which has long served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior, became the official national mammal of the United States in 2016. Bison played a key role in shaping the grasslands of the Great Plains for millennia, but today they are confined to unnaturally small ranges. National parks, including four in the Great Plains, provide a major last bastion for wild bison. Herds in Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are wild in that their movements are unconstrained within their park’s designated bison range, they receive no supplemental feed, minerals, or veterinary attention,...
The Department of the Interior Bison Conservation Initiative calls for its bureaus to plan and implement collaborative American bison conservation and to ensure involvement by tribal, state, and local governments and the public in that conservation. Four independently managed and geographically separated National Park Service (NPS) units in Interior Region 5 (IR5) preserve bison and other components of a formerly contiguous Great Plains landscape. Management of bison in IR5 parks has historically been specific to each park, and livestock and range management science informed much of the decision making. In the past two decades, NPS has shifted away from managing bison from this livestock-based perspective towards...
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One of the biggest challenges facing resource managers today is not knowing exactly when, where, and how climate change effects will unfold. While models can be used to predict the types of impacts that climate change might have on a landscape, uncertainty remains surrounding factors such as how quickly changes will occur and how specific resources will respond. In order to plan for this uncertain future, managers have begun to use a tool known as scenario planning. In this approach, a subset of global climate model projections are selected that represent a range of plausible future climate scenarios for a particular area. Through a series of facilitated workshops, managers can then explore different management...
The Capacity Building Project increased the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) constituents’ abilities to gather and use climate data through formation of the Indigenous Phenology Network (IPN), collaboration with AmericaView to join the PhenoCam network, partnership with the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) to offer free regional climate smarts courses, and mentoring of students.
This project facilitated the engagement of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s (NC CASC) Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) to identify and address the physical climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and natural resource managers in the NC CASC region, as well as meet their needs for climate information to assess impacts to their desired system and develop strategies for effective climate adaptation. A drought index called the Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) was developed to provide a near real-time assessment of soil moisture conditions across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) based on satellite observations. This projects also supported development of...
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Climate change is poised to alter natural systems, the frequency of extreme weather, and human health and livelihoods. In order to effectively prepare for and respond to these challenges in the north-central region of the U.S., people must have the knowledge and tools to develop plans and adaptation strategies. This project was a continuation of an effort begun in 2013 to build stakeholders’ capacity to respond to climate change in the north-central U.S. During the course of this project, researchers focused on two major activities: Tribal Capacity Building: Researchers provided tribal colleges and universities with mini-grants to develop student projects to document climate-related changes in weather and culturally...
Abstract (from http://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/environsci.2015.2.400): State-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) are known for their ability to explore the combined effects of multiple disturbances, ecological dynamics, and management actions on vegetation. However, integrating the additional impacts of climate change into STSMs remains a challenge. We address this challenge by combining an STSM with species distribution modeling (SDM). SDMs estimate the probability of occurrence of a given species based on observed presence and absence locations as well as environmental and climatic covariates. Thus, in order to account for changes in habitat suitability due to climate change, we used SDM to generate...
Abstract (from Environmental Evidence): Background Among the most widely anticipated climate-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution in response to changing climate conditions. In particular, a series of commonly articulated hypotheses have emerged: species are expected to shift their distributions to higher latitudes, greater elevations, and deeper depths in response to climate change, reflecting an underlying hypothesis that species will move to cooler locations to track spatial changes in the temperature of their current range. Yet, many species are not demonstrating range shifts consistent with these hypotheses. Resolving this discrepancy...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation


    map background search result map search result map Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement, Climate Training, and PhenoCam Deployment Model-Based Scenario Planning to Inform Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains Continued Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement and PhenoCam Analysis Informing Climate Change Adaptation Planning in National Parks Supporting the National Park Service Midwest Region Bison Management Plan Refining Guidance for Incorporating Climate Science and Scenario Planning into National Park Service Resource Stewardship Strategies Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks Exploring the Past to Plan for the Future: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Paleoperspectives to Inform Climate Change Adaptation Environmental DNA data, fish abundance data, and stream habitat data from northwest Montana and northeast Washington and southern British Columbia, Canada Fish abundance data, environmental DNA (eDNA) data, and stream habitat data from streams in western Montana Fish abundance, environmental DNA, and stream habitat data from Washington, and southern British Columbia, Canada Refining Guidance for Incorporating Climate Science and Scenario Planning into National Park Service Resource Stewardship Strategies Fish abundance data, environmental DNA (eDNA) data, and stream habitat data from streams in western Montana Fish abundance, environmental DNA, and stream habitat data from Washington, and southern British Columbia, Canada Informing Climate Change Adaptation Planning in National Parks Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks Supporting the National Park Service Midwest Region Bison Management Plan Environmental DNA data, fish abundance data, and stream habitat data from northwest Montana and northeast Washington and southern British Columbia, Canada Model-Based Scenario Planning to Inform Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains Exploring the Past to Plan for the Future: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Paleoperspectives to Inform Climate Change Adaptation Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement, Climate Training, and PhenoCam Deployment Continued Capacity Building in the North-Central U.S.: Tribal Engagement and PhenoCam Analysis