Climate & Fire & Adaptation
Wildfire is a growing threat in the western US, driven by high fuel loads, a warming climate, and rising human activity in the wildland urban interface. Diverse stakeholders must collaborate to mitigate risk and adapt to changing conditions. Communication strategies in collaborative efforts may be most effective if they align with local perspectives on wildfire and climate change. We
investigate drivers of residents’ subjective perceptions regarding both issues in eastern Oregon using 2018 survey data, and examine objective evidence regarding local fuel loads, climate, and
wildfire to identify trends and contextualize residents’ perceptions. We find that sociopolitical identity strongly predicts climate change beliefs, and that identity and climate beliefs predict both
perceptions of recent past climate and likely future trends. Political influences on climate perceptions are strongest among people whose friends mostly belong to the same party. In contrast, perceptions about future wildfire risks are largely independent of climate-change beliefs, and of individual or peer-group politics. Most people accurately perceive the rising frequency of large wildfires, and expect this trend to continue. Decision makers have an opportunity to engage diverse stakeholders in developing policies to mitigate increasing wildfire risk without invoking
climate change, which remains politically polarizing in some communities.
This webinar presentation lays the groundwork for an in-depth symposium at the upcoming 2020 Natural Areas Conference that will address wildfire, herbivory, climate warming, development pressures, cross-boundary management, and regional monitoring of aspen in the Western United States.
This webinar walks through the newly launched Future Avoided Cost Explorer (FACE:Hazards) with a basic demonstration of the tool’s features and answer questions about exploring the study data. This resource, provided by the State of Colorado, aims to help decision-makers determine the economic risks of future hazards – including flood, drought, and wildfire – on select sectors of Colorado’s economy.
Launch web application.
Climate Engine uses Google’s Earth Engine for on-demand processing of satellite and climate data via a web browser.
Features include:
- On-demand value and anomaly mapping
- Time series and statistical summaries
- Downloadable results in GeoTIFF format, and time series results as .csv or .xlsx format
- Share map or time series results with web URL links
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This study evaluated the potential for climate change and drought to reduce or eliminate isolated aspen communities in southwestern Idaho. We used a landscape simulation model integrated with inputs from an empirically derived biogeochemical model of growth, and a species distribution model of regeneration to forecast how changes in climate, declining snowpack, and competition with a conifer species is likely to affect aspen occupancy over the next 85-years. We found that simulated reductions in snowpack depth (and associated increases in climatic water deficit) caused a reduction in aspen persistence; aspen occupancy was reduced under all high emissions climate scenarios. Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) occupancy also declined under all future climates. Aspen regeneration declined over the course of all simulations, with an ensemble ratio of mortality/establishment increasing over the course of both low and high emissions climate scenarios. Climate-induced mortality of aspen clones increased in frequency under all climate scenarios and, under the most severe emissions scenarios, contributed to a substantial decline of aspen cover. Our research suggests that snowbanks will become an important determinant of long-term persistence of aspen under changing climate in the region.
Description: Webinar discusses the vulnerability of southwestern landscapes to climate change. Climate change has created new challenges for resource managers with broad and often complex effects that make it difficult to accurately predict and design management options to minimize undesirable impacts.To address a gap in climate vulnerability assessments available for the Southwest, Friggens and Triepke developed a modeling study for all major upland ecosystem types at spatial and thematic scales applicable to local administrative units and landscapes.
Vulnerability was determined by comparing the pre-1990 climate with the 2090 forecasted climate for all lands in Arizona and New Mexico. Results suggest the majority of lands in Arizona and New Mexico are highly vulnerable to future climate impacts, but that vulnerability varies considerably by location and ecosystem type.
Presenters: Megan Friggens, RMRS ecologist and Jack Triepke, FS southwestern region
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The United States Forest Service 2012 Planning Rule prioritizes making lands resilient to climate change. Although researchers have investigated the history of “resilience” and its multiple interpretations, few have examined perceptions or experiences of resource staff tasked with implementing resilience. This study interviewed Forest Service staff in the Southwestern Region to evaluate how managers and planners interpret resilience as an agency strategy, execution of resilience in management, and climate change’s impact on perception of resilience. Interviewees identified resilience as a main driver of agency response to land management but, when applying the concept, experienced barriers including ambiguity; scale; management specificity versus broad, adaptive landscape approach; and lack of metrics or examples. Interviewees found restoring ecosystem function to promote resilience while planning for future changed landscapes difficult. They desired landscape-scale collaboration to understand how to operationalize the resilience directive. Our findings revealed obstacles and opportunities for resilience in a managerial context.
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The 2020 Natural Areas Virtual Conference- Sierra to sagebrush: Integrating management and stewardship across landscapes was an engaging virtual format providing as much research, technique and practical application of science as you have come to expect at a Natural Areas Conference.
The 47th Natural Areas Conference is focused on the unique ecological and management dynamics that distinguish the Nevada-California borderlands, the Great Basin and Sierra mountains. This conference is designed to bring together land and resource managers, scientists, and policy makers to share and discuss creative ideas that cross disciplines, ecosystems, and jurisdictional boundaries. These interactions are critical to solving landscape scale issues in the region.
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This study reports an automated method of mapping rangeland fractional component cover over a large portion of the northern Great Basin, from 1986 to 2016 using a dense Landsat imagery time series. Over the 30‐yr period, shrub cover declined and bare ground increased. While few pixels had >10% cover change, a large majority had at least some change. All fractional components had significant spatial relationships with water year precipitation (WYPRCP), maximum temperature (WYTMAX), and minimum temperature (WYTMIN) in all years. Shrub and sagebrush cover in particular respond positively to warming WYTMIN, resulting from the largest increases in WYTMIN being in the coolest and wettest areas, and respond negatively to warming WYTMAX because the largest increases in WYTMAX are in the warmest and driest areas. The trade‐off of lowering temporal density against removing cloud‐contaminated years is justified as temporal density appears to have only a modest impact on trends and climate relationships until n ≤ 6, but multi‐year gaps are proportionally more influential. Gradual change analysis is likely to be less sensitive to n than abrupt change. These data can be used to answer critical questions regarding the influence of climate change and the suitability of management practices.
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A new study shows burned leaf litter and other biomaterials can leach these molecules—called pyrogenic carbon—into fresh water where they react with sunlight. That means pyrogenic carbon in our waterways could degrade into carbon dioxide faster than previously suggested, providing an unexpected source of this greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, according to the researchers.