Exploring Future Flora, Environments, and Climates Through Simulations (EFFECTS)

Implications of Climate Change for Conservation and Natural Resource Managers

Climate change will significantly alter the distributions of some species and habitats, change the magnitude and frequency of disturbance regimes (e.g., fire and drought occurrence), and affect the ability of conservation and natural resource managers to manage public and private lands in the United States (U.S.). We are working with conservation and natural resource scientists and managers to develop simulations and analyses of potential future climate change impacts that will be useful for developing management responses to climate change.

One aspect of this research involves developing fine spatial resolution simulations of future vegetation and habitat change. These simulations allow conservation and natural resource scientists and managers to better evaluate the potential regional impacts of future climate change for the systems and landscapes they manage. The figure below is a 30-second spatial resolution simulation of potential habitat for the western U.S. This simulation reproduces the general pattern of vegetation across the western U.S. and captures the effect of topography on vegetation.

References

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Miller, D. A., and R. A. White. 1998. A conterminous United States multilayer soil characteristics dataset for regional climate and hydrology modeling. Earth Interactions 2: 2-002. [Available online at http://EarthInteractions.org.]

New, M., Lister, D., Hulme, M., & Makin, I. 2002. A high-resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas. Climate Research 21:1-25.