Filters: Contacts: Shelley Crausbay (X) > Types: Citation (X)
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Drought is a complex challenge experienced in specific locations through diverse impacts, including ecological impacts. Different professionals involved in drought preparedness and response approach the problem from different points of view, which means they may or may not recognize ecological impacts. This study examines the extent to which interviewees perceive ecological drought in the Upper Missouri Headwaters basin in southwestern Montana. Through semistructured interviews, this research investigates individuals’ perceptions of drought by analyzing how they define drought, how they describe their roles related to drought, and the extent to which they emphasize ecological impacts of drought. Results suggest...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing unprecedented and lasting change, a new management paradigm is forming, supported by a decision-oriented framework that presents three distinct management choices: resist, accept, or direct the ecological trajectory. To make these choices strategically, managers seek to understand the nature of the transformation that could occur if change is accepted while identifying opportunities to intervene to resist or direct change. In this article, we seek to inspire a research agenda...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Pinyon–juniper (PJ) woodlands are an important component of dryland ecosystems across the US West and are potentially susceptible to ecological transformation. However, predicting woodland futures is complicated by species-specific strategies for persisting and reproducing under drought conditions, uncertainty in future climate, and limitations to inferring demographic rates from forest inventory data. Here, we leverage new demographic models to quantify how climate change is expected to alter population demographics in five PJ tree species in the US West and place our results in the context of a climate adaptation framework to resist, accept, or direct ecological transformation. Two of five study species, Pinus...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
THE RISING RISK OF DROUGHT. Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). For example, the “Millennium Drought”...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
The southwestern U.S. is a global hotspot of climate change. Models project that temperatures will continue to rise through the end of the 21st century, accompanied by significant changes to the hydrological cycle. Within the Sonoran Desert, a limited number of studies have documented climate change impacts on the phenology of native plant species. Much of this phenological work to understand climate change impacts to phenology builds on research conducted nearly three decades ago to define flowering triggers and developmental requirements for native keystone Sonoran Desert woody species. Here we expand on the drivers and explore recent phenological trends for six species using a unique 36-year observational data...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Abstract (from One Earth): Novel forms of drought are emerging globally, due to climate change, shifting teleconnection patterns, expanding human water use, and a history of human influence on the environment that increases the probability of transformational ecological impacts. These costly ecological impacts cascade to human communities, and understanding this changing drought landscape is one of today’s grand challenges. By using a modified horizon-scanning approach that integrated scientists, managers, and decision-makers, we identified the emerging issues in ecological drought that represent key challenges to timely and effective responses. Here we review the themes that most urgently need attention, including...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Natural resource managers worldwide face a growing challenge: Intensifying global change increasingly propels ecosystems toward irreversible ecological transformations. This nonstationarity challenges traditional conservation goals and human well-being. It also confounds a longstanding management paradigm that assumes a future that reflects the past. As once-familiar ecological conditions disappear, managers need a new approach to guide decision-making. The resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework, designed for and by managers, identifies the options managers have for responding and helps them make informed, purposeful, and strategic choices in this context. Moving beyond the diversity and complexity of myriad emerging...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
Throughout the world, forests cover mountain slopes only up at a certain elevation. Above that level, trees become scattered. Higher up, no trees are found. The level where the forest ends, called the forest line or timberline, is higher in tropical areas than in colder regions, suggesting that cold climate conditions prevent forests from growing at higher elevations. On tropical island mountains, such as those in the Hawaiian Islands, the forest line is found at a lower elevation than we would expect based on the temperature. This leads us to suspect that some factor other than temperature, such as low rainfall, might be controlling the level of forest lines on these tropical islands. In this project, we sought...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Climate,
Drought,
Drought,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
El Niño,
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
This project investigated how climate change over the last 21,000 years, which was characterized by significant warming, influenced vegetation in the Southern and Middle Rockies. We found that rapid vegetation change was initiated across these landscapes once a 2 ℃ temperature increase was realized and again recently with reduced rainfall. Southwesterly slopes in the Southern Rockies were prone to rapid change, otherwise landscape features didn’t have a strong effect. We also examined vegetation transformations (e.g., sagebrush steppe switches to a lodgepole pine forest) and identified between one and four vegetation transformations at each site, for a total of 60 transformations, over half of which occurred rapidly....
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service
Institutional authority and responsibility for allocating water to ecosystems (“ecologically available water” [EAW]) is spread across local, state, and federal agencies, which operate under a range of statutes, mandates, and planning processes. We use a case study of the Upper Missouri Headwaters Basin in southwestern Montana, United States, to illustrate this fragmented institutional landscape. Our goals are to (a) describe the patchwork of agencies and institutional actors whose intersecting authorities and actions influence the EAW in the study basin; (b) describe the range of governance mechanisms these agencies use, including laws, policies, administrative programs, and planning processes; and (c) assess the...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation
These model objects are the outputs of two Bayesian hierarchical models (one for the Middle Rockies and one for the Southern Rockies) to explore the role of landscape characteristics in climate-driven ecological change and transformation. We used the rate of change for each site at 100-yr time steps as the response variable, and included elevation, CHILI, aspect, slope, and TPI as fixed effects in the models, run separately for each ecoregion. We included a random intercept of site to quantify the magnitude of site-level variation in rate-of-change that may be unaccounted for by our covariates.
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: The Rockies,
atmospheric and climatic processes,
climate change,
vegetation
Grasslands in the Great Plains are of ecological, economic, and cultural importance in the United States. In response to a need to understand how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century, the U.S. Geological Survey North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center led a synthesis of peer-reviewed climate and ecology literature relevant to grassland management in the North Central Region (including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas). This synthesis was done to begin to address grassland managers’ information needs and identify research gaps. This open-file report summarizes the impacts of climate change and variability...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service
This database integrates a list of vegetation transformations that occurred across the Southern and Middle Rockies since 21,000 years ago, the age of occurrence, the type of vegetation switch that occurred, whether the rates of vegetation change peaked at that time, and when applicable, the duration of peak rates of vegetation change.
Categories: Data,
Publication;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: The Rockies,
atmospheric and climatic processes,
climate change,
vegetation
We assessed tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF) sensitivity to natural disturbance by drought, fire, and dieback with a 7300-year-long paleorecord. We analyzed pollen assemblages, charcoal accumulation rates, and higher plant biomarker compounds (average chain length [ACL] of n-alkanes) in sediments from Wai’ānapanapa, a small lake near the upper forest limit and the mean trade wind inversion (TWI) in Hawai‘i. The paleorecord of ACL suggests increased drought frequency and a lower TWI elevation from 2555–1323 cal yr B.P. and 606–334 cal yr B.P. Charcoal began to accumulate and a novel fire regime was initiated ca. 880 cal yr B.P., followed by a decreased fire return interval at ca. 550 cal yr B.P. Diebacks occurred...
Categories: Data,
Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Citation,
Journal,
LCC Network Science Catalog,
LCC Science Catalog,
Pacific Islands LCC,
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