Climate change will affect not only natural and cultural resources within protected areas but also tourism and visitation patterns. The U.S. National Park Service systematically collects data ...regarding its 270+ million annual recreation visits, and therefore provides an opportunity to examine how human visitation may respond to climate change from the tropics to the polar regions. To assess the relationship between climate and park visitation, we evaluated historical monthly mean air temperature and visitation data (1979-2013) at 340 parks and projected potential future visitation (2041-2060) based on two warming-climate scenarios and two visitation-growth scenarios. For the entire park system a third-order polynomial temperature model explained 69% of the variation in historical visitation trends. Visitation generally increased with increasing average monthly temperature, but decreased strongly with temperatures > 25°C. Linear to polynomial monthly temperature models also explained historical visitation at individual parks (R2 0.12-0.99, mean = 0.79, median = 0.87). Future visitation at almost all parks (95%) may change based on historical temperature, historical visitation, and future temperature projections. Warming-mediated increases in potential visitation are projected for most months in most parks (67-77% of months; range across future scenarios), resulting in future increases in total annual visits across the park system (8-23%) and expansion of the visitation season at individual parks (13-31 days). Although very warm months at some parks may see decreases in future visitation, this potential change represents a relatively small proportion of visitation across the national park system. A changing climate is likely to have cascading and complex effects on protected area visitation, management, and local economies. Results suggest that protected areas and neighboring communities that develop adaptation strategies for these changes may be able to both capitalize on opportunities and minimize detriment related to changing visitation.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The climate crisis is the greatest public health threat of the 21st century. Excessive heat is responsible for more deaths than any other extreme weather event, and the frequency, intensity, and ...duration of extreme heat events are increasing globally due to climate change. Exposure to excessive heat can result in heat related illnesses (HRIs) and long-term poor health outcomes. Physical exertion, sudden exposure to excessive heat, and the lack of physical or behavioral adaptation resources are all associated with greater HRI risk, which is expected to increase for visitors to Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) and other public lands as climate change worsens.
Our objectives were to understand 1) the relationship between weather and HRI in GCNP visitors, 2) how future HRI rates may change, and 3) how land management agencies can update risk mitigation strategies to match changing risk and better manage an increased HRI burden.
We utilized previously published data on HRI in GCNP visitors, and records of daily visitation, temperatures, and maximum and minimum daily humidity from the same study period to develop a model estimate for HRI risk. We then used future climate projections from the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 multi-model dataset to model future HRI risk under different climate scenarios.
The incidence of HRI was significantly associated with maximum daily temperature and minimum relative humidity, and was more common in the shoulder season months. We estimated that HRI will increase 29%-137% over 2004-2009 levels through 2100, assuming no change in visitation.
Climate change will continue to increase HRI risk for GCNP visitors and poses risks to public land managers' mission to provide for safe recreation experiences for the benefit of this and future generations in places like GCNP. Excessive risk during the shoulder season months presents an opportunity to increase preventative search and rescue and education efforts to mitigate increased risk.
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Birds in U.S. national parks find strong protection from many longstanding and pervasive threats, but remain highly exposed to effects of ongoing climate change. To understand how climate change is ...likely to alter bird communities in parks, we used species distribution models relating North American Breeding Bird Survey (summer) and Audubon Christmas Bird Count (winter) observations to climate data from the early 2000s and projected to 2041-2070 (hereafter, mid-century) under high and low greenhouse gas concentration trajectories, RCP8.5 and RCP2.6. We analyzed climate suitability projections over time for 513 species across 274 national parks, classifying them as improving, worsening, stable, potential colonization, and potential extirpation. U.S. national parks are projected to become increasingly important for birds in the coming decades as potential colonizations exceed extirpations in 62-100% of parks, with an average ratio of potential colonizations to extirpations of 4.1 in winter and 1.4 in summer under RCP8.5. Average species turnover is 23% in both summer and winter under RCP8.5. Species turnover (Bray-Curtis) and potential colonization and extirpation rates are positively correlated with latitude in the contiguous 48 states. Parks in the Midwest and Northeast are expected to see particularly high rates of change. All patterns are more extreme under RCP8.5 than under RCP2.6. Based on the ratio of potential colonization and extirpation, parks were classified into overall trend groups associated with specific climate-informed conservation strategies. Substantial change to bird and ecological communities is anticipated in coming decades, and current thinking suggests managing towards a forward-looking concept of ecological integrity that accepts change and novel ecological conditions, rather than focusing management goals exclusively on maintaining or restoring a static set of historical conditions.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
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 frameworks, RAD is a simple, flexible, decision-making tool that encompasses the entire decision space for stewarding transforming ecosystems. Through shared application of a common approach, the RAD framework can help the wider natural resource management and research community build the robust, shared habits of mind necessary for a new, twenty-first-century natural resource management paradigm.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Climate change adaptation is a rapidly evolving field in conservation biology and includes a range of strategies from resisting to actively directing change on the landscape. The term ‘climate change ...resilience,’ frequently used to characterize adaptation strategies, deserves closer scrutiny because it is ambiguous, often misunderstood, and difficult to apply consistently across disciplines and spatial and temporal scales to support conservation efforts. Current definitions of resilience encompass all aspects of adaptation from resisting and absorbing change to reorganizing and transforming in response to climate change. However, many stakeholders are unfamiliar with this spectrum of definitions and assume the more common meaning of returning to a previous state after a disturbance. Climate change, however, is unrelenting and intensifying, characterized by both directional shifts in baseline conditions and increasing variability in extreme events. This ongoing change means that scientific understanding and management responses must develop concurrently, iteratively, and collaboratively, in a science-management partnership. Divergent concepts of climate change resilience impede cross-jurisdictional adaptation efforts and complicate use of adaptive management frameworks. Climate change adaptation practitioners require clear terminology to articulate management strategies and the inherent tradeoffs involved in adaptation. Language that distinguishes among strategies that seek to resist change, accommodate change, and direct change (i.e., persistence, autonomous change, and directed change) is prerequisite to clear communication about climate change adaptation goals and management intentions in conservation areas.
Managing for RADical ecosystem change Lynch, Abigail J; Thompson, Laura M; Beever, Erik A ...
Frontiers in ecology and the environment,
10/2021, Letnik:
19, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Ecosystem transformation involves the emergence of persistent ecological or social–ecological systems that diverge, dramatically and irreversibly, from prior ecosystem structure and function. Such ...transformations are occurring at increasing rates across the planet in response to changes in climate, land use, and other factors. Consequently, a dynamic view of ecosystem processes that accommodates rapid, irreversible change will be critical for effectively conserving fish, wildlife, and other natural resources, and maintaining ecosystem services. However, managing ecosystems toward states with novel structure and function is an inherently unpredictable and difficult task. Managers navigating ecosystem transformation can benefit from considering broader objectives, beyond a traditional focus on resisting ecosystem change, by also considering whether accepting inevitable change or directing it along some desirable pathway is more feasible (that is, practical and appropriate) under some circumstances (the RAD framework). By explicitly acknowledging transformation and implementing an iterative RAD approach, natural resource managers can be deliberate and strategic in addressing profound ecosystem change.
Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, ...scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible future climates that could occur at a specific place and time. Divergent climate futures that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions support information needs of decision makers, including understanding the spectrum of potential resource responses to climate change, developing strategies robust to that range, avoiding highly consequential surprises, and averting maladaptation. Here, we discuss three approaches for generating climate futures: a Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP)-ensemble, a quadrant-average, and an individual-projection approach. All are designed to capture relevant uncertainty, but they differ in utility for different applications, complexity, and effort required to implement. Using an application from Big Bend National Park as an example of numerous similar efforts to develop climate futures for National Park Service applications over the past decade, we compare these approaches, focusing on their ability to capture among-projection divergence during early-, mid-, and late-twenty-first century periods to align with near-, mid-, and long-term planning efforts. The quadrant-average approach and especially the individual-projection approach captured a broader range of plausible future conditions than the RCP-ensemble approach, particularly in the near term. Therefore, the individual-projection approach supports decision makers seeking to understand the broadest potential characterization of future conditions. We discuss tradeoffs associated with different climate future approaches and highlight suitable applications.
Abstract
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 for transformation science that is focused on ecological and social science and based on five central questions that align with the resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework. Development of transformation science is needed to apply the RAD framework and support natural resource management and conservation on our rapidly changing planet.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Intensifying global change is propelling many ecosystems toward irreversible transformations. Natural resource managers face the complex task of conserving these important resources under ...unprecedented conditions and expanding uncertainty. As once familiar ecological conditions disappear, traditional management approaches that assume the future will reflect the past are becoming increasingly untenable. In the present article, we place adaptive management within the resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework to assist informed risk taking for transforming ecosystems. This approach empowers managers to use familiar techniques associated with adaptive management in the unfamiliar territory of ecosystem transformation. By providing a common lexicon, it gives decision makers agency to revisit objectives, consider new system trajectories, and discuss RAD strategies in relation to current system state and direction of change. Operationalizing RAD adaptive management requires periodic review and update of management actions and objectives; monitoring, experimentation, and pilot studies; and bet hedging to better identify and tolerate associated risks.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In fire‐prone ecosystems, knowledge of vegetation–fire–climate relationships and the history of fire suppression and Indigenous cultural burning can inform discussions of how to use fire as a ...management tool, particularly as climate continues to change rapidly. On Wiisaakodewan‐minis/Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore of Wisconsin, USA, structural changes in a pine‐dominated natural area containing a globally rare barrens community occurred after the cessation of cultural burning by the Indigenous Ojibwe people and the imposition of fire‐suppression policies, leading to questions about the historical role of fire in this culturally and ecologically important area. To help understand better the ecological context needed to steward these pine forest and barrens communities, we developed palaeoecological records of vegetation, fire, and hydrological change using pollen, charcoal, and testate amoebae preserved in peat and sediment cores collected from bog and lagoon sediments within the pine‐dominated landscape. Results indicated that fire has been an integral part of Stockton Island ecology for at least 6000 years. Logging in the early 1900s led to persistent changes in island vegetation, and post‐logging fires of the 1920s and 1930s were anomalous in the context of the past millennium, likely reflecting more severe and/or extensive burning than in the past. Before that, the composition and structure of pine forest and barrens had changed little, perhaps due to regular low‐severity surface fires, which may have occurred with a frequency consistent with Indigenous oral histories (~4–8 years). Higher severity fire episodes, indicated by large charcoal peaks above background levels in the records, occurred predominantly during droughts, suggesting that more frequent or more intense droughts in the future may increase fire frequency and severity. The persistence of pine forest and barrens vegetation through past periods of climatic change indicates considerable ecological resistance and resilience. Future persistence in the face of climate changes outside this historical range of variability may depend in part on returning fire to these systems.
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