lessons from mountain ecosystems edited by andrew J. Hansen, william b. monahan, david m. theobald, and s. thomas olliff Climate Change in Wildlands Pioneering Approaches to Science and Management
climate change in wildlands
Climate Change in Wildlands Pioneering Approaches to Science and Management Edited by Andrew J. Hansen, William B. Monahan, S. Thomas Olliff, and David M. Theobald Washington Covelo London
Copyright 2016 Island Press All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036 ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics. No copyright claim is made in the works of William B. Monahan, S. Thomas Olliff, Isabel W. Ashton, Ben Bobowski, Karl Buermeyer, Robert Al-Chokhachy, John E. Gross, Nathaniel Hitt, Virginia Kelly, Matthew A. Kulp, Kristin Legg, Shuang Li, Forrest Melton, Cristina Milesi, Jeffrey T. Morisette, Ramakrishna Nemani, Ashley Quackenbush, Daniel Reinhart, Ann Rodman, David Thoma, and Jun Xiong, employees of the federal government. Island Press would like to thank Katie Dolan for generously supporting the publication of this book. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952374 Printed on recycled, acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: Island Press, climate change, wildlands, climate adaptation planning, Climate-Smart Conservation, resource management, federal lands, climate science, land use, Rocky Mountains, Appalachian Mountains, vulnerability assessment, exposure, sensitivity, potential impact, adaptive capacity, vegetation response, coldwater fish, whitebark pine, sugar maple, landscape conservation cooperative, climate science center, national park.
contents Foreword Woody Turner xi Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1. Why Study Climate Change in Wildlands? 1 Andrew J. Hansen PART 1: APPROACHES FOR CLIMATE ADAPTATION PLANNING Chapter 2. Effectively Linking Climate Science and Management 17 John E. Gross and S. Thomas Olliff Chapter 3. Challenges and Approaches for Integrating Climate 33 Science into Federal Land Management S. Thomas Olliff and Andrew J. Hansen PART 2: CLIMATE AND LAND USE CHANGE Chapter 4. Analyses of Historical and Projected Climates to Support 55 Climate Adaptation in the Northern Rocky Mountains John E. Gross, Michael Tercek, Kevin Guay, Marian Talbert, Tony Chang, Ann Rodman, David Thoma, Patrick Jantz, and Jeffrey T. Morisette vii
viii Contents Chapter 5. Historical and Projected Climates as a Basis for Climate 78 Change Exposure and Adaptation Potential across the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative Kevin Guay, Patrick Jantz, John E. Gross, Brendan M. Rogers, and Scott J. Goetz Chapter 6. Assessing Vulnerability to Land Use and Climate 95 Change at Landscape Scales Using Landforms and Physiographic Diversity as Coarse-Filter Targets David M. Theobald, William B. Monahan, Dylan Harrison- Atlas, Andrew J. Hansen, Patrick Jantz, John E. Gross, and S. Thomas Olliff PART 3: ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES AND VULNERABILITIES Chapter 7. Potential Impacts of Climate and Land Use Change 119 on Ecosystem Processes in the Great Northern and Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperatives Forrest Melton, Jun Xiong, Weile Wang, Cristina Milesi, Shuang Li, Ashley Quackenbush, David M. Theobald, Scott J. Goetz, Patrick Jantz, and Ramakrishna Nemani Chapter 8. Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Vegetation 151 for National Parks in the Eastern United States Patrick Jantz, William B. Monahan, Andrew J. Hansen, Brendan M. Rogers, Scott Zolkos, Tina Cormier, and Scott J. Goetz Chapter 9. Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Tree Species 174 and Biome Types in the Northern Rocky Mountains Andrew J. Hansen and Linda B. Phillips Chapter 10. Past, Present, and Future Impacts of Climate on the 190 Vegetation Communities of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem across Elevation Gradients Nathan B. Piekielek, Andrew J. Hansen, and Tony Chang
Contents ix Chapter 11. Vulnerability of Tree Species to Climate Change in the 212 Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative Brendan M. Rogers, Patrick Jantz, Scott J. Goetz, and David M. Theobald Chapter 12. Likely Responses of Native and Invasive Salmonid 234 Fishes to Climate Change in the Rocky Mountains and Appalachian Mountains Bradley B. Shepard, Robert Al-Chokhachy, Todd Koel, Matthew A. Kulp, and Nathaniel Hitt PART 4: MANAGING UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE Chapter 13. Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities 259 for Achieving Climate-Smart Adaptation S. Thomas Olliff, William B. Monahan, Virginia Kelly, and David M. Theobald Chapter 14. Perspectives on Responding to Climate Change 279 in Rocky Mountain National Park Ben Bobowski, Isabel W. Ashton, and William B. Monahan Chapter 15. Case Study: Whitebark Pine in the Greater 304 Yellowstone Ecosystem Karl Buermeyer, Daniel Reinhart, and Kristin Legg Chapter 16. Insights from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem 327 on Assessing Success in Sustaining Wildlands Andrew J. Hansen and Linda B. Phillips Chapter 17. Synthesis of Climate Adaptation Planning 354 in Wildland Ecosystems Andrew J. Hansen, David M. Theobald, S. Thomas Olliff, and William B. Monahan About the Contributors 368
foreword Land managers have a responsibility to preserve the ecological integrity of the landscapes they manage. Climate change is a global phenomenon affecting these landscapes in complex ways. Adaptation to climate change to sustain ecological integrity requires understanding how this global phenomenon will play out at the landscape scale. Thus, managers and members of the public who care about natural systems share a need to translate the effects of global climate change to the scale of a park, forest, refuge, or other management unit. Complicating this translation are coincident and interacting changes in land use. The challenge of maintaining the ecological integrity of natural landscapes under the dual onslaught of climate change and land use change is a seemingly hopeless task for those managing locally without direct access to the regional, much less global, picture. Bringing the bigger picture to land managers responding to a rapidly changing world is possible, as the following pages make clear. Required is an integration of the latest observation technologies, including satellites imaging globally at landscape resolutions (i.e., pixel sizes ranging from tens to hundreds of square meters) and an interoperable framework for climate and ecological models to relate climate and land use changes to ecological responses. This book represents the capstone of the Landscape Climate Change Vulnerability Project (LCCVP). NASA funded the LCCVP in 2011 to explore the potential of using a range of observations from satellites to in situ sensors with a wide array of models, all operating on a powerful computer platform, to forecast the vulnerability of ecosystems and individual species to the inseparable twin threats of climate change and land use change. The project focus has been landscapes managed by federal land managers. More specifically, the project provided analyses, decision support tools, and dialogue on climate adaptation for managers working in two landscape conservation cooperatives, or LCCs: the Great Northern LCC and the Appalachian LCC. Both LCCs center on mountain ranges, typically seen as areas of rapid biological movement under changing climate. However, the contrasting responses of life in these two North American mountain chains to recent climate reflect the complex and unique ways in which similar but xi
xii Foreword different ecosystems react locally to a global phenomenon. These differing responses point to the necessity of downscaling the impacts of climate change and land use change as closely as possible to the local level, because nationally even regionally modeled responses are insufficient to address management needs. This book is for those attempting to maintain natural ecosystems and the species within them through a period of interacting climate change and land use change. It is also for anyone interested in understanding the effects of these changes on wildlands. Despite the challenging goals, there is much hope in these pages. We are developing the tools to allow humans to predict and visualize the impacts of change, natural and anthropogenic, on the world around us the world on which we all depend for countless environmental goods and services. As a species, we perhaps stand alone in the degree to which our actions affect the entire planet. A global footprint carries with it great responsibility for how one steps out in the world. Yet stepping responsibly requires better understanding of how natural systems function and respond to change. The authors assemble cutting-edge research and twenty-first-century technologies to offer stewards and users of public lands and surrounding private lands a detailed view of the future for North American mountain ecosystems. In so doing, they show the way for those interested in conserving natural systems on a changing planet. Woody Turner Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters Science Mission Directorate Washington, D.C. July 2015
acknowledgments Many people and organizations contributed to bringing this book to fruition. Funding was provided by the NASA Applied Sciences Program (10-BIOCLIM10-0034, 05-DEC05-S2-0010), the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (15-EARTH15R-0003), the NASA Land Cover Land Use Change Program (05-LC/LUC05-2-0089), the North Central Climate Sciences Center (G13AC00394, G14AP00181, G15AP00074), and NSF EPSCoR Track-I EPS-1101342 (INSTEP 3). Program managers administrating this support include Woody Turner, Jay Skiles, Garik Gutman, and Jeff Morisette. Grant administration at Montana State University was enabled by Julie Geyer, Joan McDonald, Barbara Bungee, and Sondra Torma. In-kind support for salaries of federal employees on the research team was provided by the DOI Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative and the DOI National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program, Climate Change Response Programs, and the Intermountain Region. The work benefited from discussions with many scientists, including Richard Waring, Steve Running, Cathy Whitlock, Jeff Morisette, Dennis Ojima, Robert Keane, Dave Roberts, Joseph Barsugli, Gary Tabor, Ben Poulter, Brian Miller, Shannon McNeeley, Nick Fisichelli, Gregor Schuurman, Jeff Connor, Tammy Cook, Ann Rodman, Roy Renkin, P. J. White, Doug Smith, Molly Cross, Arjun Adhikari, Kathryn Ireland, and Regan Nelson. Linda Phillips coordinated communication among the book s authors, production of graphics, and formatting of chapters. Barbara Dean and Erin Johnson, editors from Island Press, guided us through the process from an initial query letter through production of the book. Several federal resource specialists closely collaborated with the research team (see table 3-1 in chapter 3). Most central in linking the science with agency managers were Virginia Kelly (Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee), Ben Bobowski (Rocky Mountain National Park), Dave Hallac and Ann Rodman (Yellowstone National Park), Kristin Legg (NPS I&M Greater Yellowstone Network), Matt Marshall (NPS I&M Eastern Rivers xiii
xiv Acknowledgments and Mountains Network), Jim Renfro (Great Smoky Mountains National Park), Jim Schaberl (Shenandoah National Park), Karl Buermeyer and Dan Reinhart (Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee Whitebark Pine Subcommittee), Richard Evans and Leslie Morelock (Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area), Robert Emmott (NPS I&M Appalachian Highlands Network), Jim Comiskey (NPS I&M Mid-Atlantic Network), Sue Consolo Murphy and Kelly McClosky (Grand Teton National Park), and Mike Britten (NPS I&M Rocky Mountain Network). The authors of the chapters invested heavily in telling the stories of climate change in the Rockies and the Appalachian Mountains and were responsive to the many rounds of revisions the book underwent. We sincerely thank all of these individuals and organizations.