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Climate Change Vulnerability
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New climate change vulnerability assessments for 41 species and 3 habitats in the Appalachians are now available. The conservation community can view and search each of these assessments by vulnerability scores, conservation status ranks, state and subregion of assessment, and higher taxonomy. In addition, principle investigators NatureServe compiled the results of 700 species assessments previously completed by other researchers as well as assessments on several habitats.
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Vulnerability
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South-Central Interior Small Stream and Riparian Habitat
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This habitat was assessed in both the Cumberland - Southern Appalachian subregion and the Interior Low Plateau subregion. Results are in the first two tabs of the spreadsheet. A description of the habitat, and a list of associated species, is included in the description tab. The remaining tabs describe the individual factors and their definitions. These results are in the review stage. Please send comments to lesley_sneddon@natureserve.org.
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Vulnerability
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Phase II: Vulnerability Assessments
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Habitat Vulnerability Assessments
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Interior Low Plateau Climate Change Vulnerability Species Assessments
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the western portion of the LCC, covering the area from Western Kentucky, northeastern Alabama and western Tennessee west to southern Indiana and southeastern Illinois.
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
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Cumberland - Southern Appalachian Climate Change Vulnerability Species Assessments
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the southeastern portion of the LCC, covering the area from southern West Virginia, south to Alabama, west to eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Hyperlinks to additional information are separated into two additional spreadsheets, one for aquatic and subterranean, and another for terrestrial species.
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
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Central Appalachian subregion climate change vulnerability species assessments Excel Spreadsheet
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the northern-most portion of the LCC, covering the area from New York south to West Virginia and Virginia, west to Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Results included are Byers and Norris 2011 (West Virginia); Furedi et al. 2011 (Pennsylvania), Ring et al. 2013 (New Jersey), Schlesinger et al. 2011 (New York); Virginia Division of Natural Heritage 2010 (Virginia). It also includes the results from species assessed as part of the current study (Sneddon et al. 2015).
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
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Interior Low Plateau subregion climate change vulnerability species assessments
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These results are a compilation of climate change vulnerability assessments in the western portion of the LCC, covering the area from Western Kentucky, northeastern Alabama and western Tennessee west to southern Indiana and southeastern Illinois. Results included are from Bruno et al. (Cumberland Piedmont Network of the National Park Service; and Walk et al. 2011 (illinois). It also includes the results from species assessed as part of the current study (Sneddon et al. 2015).
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Vulnerability Assessment Foundational Data by Subregion
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Vulnerability of at-risk species to climate change in New York
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This report provides the methods and results of climate change vulnerability assessments of 119 species in New York.
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Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability
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Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments Source Materials
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Analysis of monotonic greening and browning trends from global NDVI time-series
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Remotely sensed vegetation indices are widely used to detect greening and browning trends; especially the global coverage of time-series normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data which are available from 1981. Seasonality and serial auto-correlation in the data have previously been dealt with by integrating the data to annual values; as an alternative to reducing the temporal resolution, we apply harmonic analyses and non-parametric trend tests to the GIMMS NDVI dataset (1981–2006). Using the complete dataset, greening and browning trends were analyzed using a linear model corrected for seasonality by subtracting the seasonal component, and a seasonal non-parametric model. In a third approach, phenological shift and variation in length of growing season were accounted for by analyzing the time-series using vegetation development stages rather than calendar days. Results differed substantially between the models, even though the input data were the same. Prominent regional greening trends identified by several other studies were confirmed but the models were inconsistent in areas with weak trends. The linear model using data corrected for seasonality showed similar trend slopes to those described in previous work using linear models on yearly mean values. The non-parametric models demonstrated the significant influence of variations in phenology; accounting for these variations should yield more robust trend analyses and better understanding of vegetation trends.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Evaluating the Effects and Effectiveness of Post-fire Seeding Treatments in Western Forests
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Key Findings• In studies that evaluated soil erosion in seeded versus unseeded controls, 78 percent revealed that seeding did not reduce erosion relative to unseeded controls. Even when seeding significantly increased vegetative cover, there was insufficient plant cover to stabilize soils within the first two years after fire. •Sixty percent of the studies reported that seeding deterred native plant recovery in the short-term. •Out of 11 papers that evaluated the ability of seeding to curtail non-native plant species invasions, 54 percent stated that seeding treatments were effective and 45 percent stated they were ineffective.• Forty papers and 67 Burned Area Reports dated between 1970 and 2006 revealed an increased use of native species and annual cereal grains/hybrids during seeding treatments over time, with native species dominating seed mixes. • From 2000 to 2007, total Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) seeding expenditures have increased substantially, reaching an average of $3.3 million per year—a 192 percent increase compared to the average spent over the previous 30 years.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Adaptive management of biological systems: A review
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Adaptive Management (AM) is widely considered to be the best available approach for managing biolog- ical systems in the presence of uncertainty. But AM has arguably only rarely succeeded in improving bio- diversity outcomes. There is therefore an urgent need for reflection regarding how practitioners might overcome key problems hindering greater implementation of AM. In this paper, we present the first structured review of the AM literature that relates to biodiversity and ecosystem management, with the aim of quantifying how rare AM projects actually are. We also investigated whether AM practitioners in terrestrial and aquatic systems described the same problems; the degree of consistency in how the term ‘adaptive management’ was applied; the extent to which AM projects were sustained over time; and whether articles describing AM projects were more highly cited than comparable non-AM articles. We found that despite the large number of articles identified through the ISI web of knowledge (n = 1336), only 61 articles (<5%) explicitly claimed to enact AM. These 61 articles cumulatively described 54 separate projects, but only 13 projects were supported by published monitoring data. The extent to which these 13 projects applied key aspects of the AM philosophy – such as referring to an underlying conceptual model, enacting ongoing monitoring, and comparing alternative management actions – varied enormously. Further, most AM projects were of short duration; terrestrial studies discussed biodiversity conservation significantly more frequently than aquatic studies; and empirical studies were no more highly cited than qualitative articles. Our review highlights that excessive use of the term ‘adaptive man- agement’ is rife in the peer-reviewed literature. However, a small but increasing number of projects have been able to effectively apply AM to complex problems. We suggest that attempts to apply AM may be improved by: (1) Better collaboration between scientists and representatives from resource-extracting industries. (2) Better communication of the risks of not doing AM. (3) Ensuring AM projects ‘‘pass the test of management relevance’’.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
