Other Landscapes

Over the past century, Hawaiʻi has experienced a pronounced decline in precipitation and stream flow and a number of severe droughts. These changes can have wide-reaching implications, affecting the water supply, native vegetation and wildlife, wildfire patterns, and the spread of invasive species. Several climate-related factors are influencing Hawaiˈi’s landscapes and contributing to these chang

The U.S. Northern Rocky Mountains support a large number of native wildlife species, and survival of these populations depends on connected landscapes to support current migration and dispersal, as well as future shifts in species’ ranges. However, habitat fragmentation and loss threaten these connections. Land and wildlife managers across the U.S. are faced with decisions focused on reducing ris

The conversion of grassland to cropland in the Dakotas could imperil wildlife such as nesting waterfowl and contribute to the degradation of water quality in the Mississippi River watershed. However, high crop prices in recent years have contributed to a high rate of grassland to cropland conversion on private lands. In addition to these economic factors, changes in climate could exacerbate the ch

Understanding how to manage scarce water during drought is one of the great challenges we face as a society, particularly for communities in the Rio Grande Basin. Severe drought coupled with human development have profoundly impacted the quantity and quality of water in the basin. Running through Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, the Rio Grande is a multi-national resource that is managed b

Increasing numbers of hazardous inundation events due to climate change is a serious threat to the culture, habitat, and infrastructure of the Hawaiian and U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands. The information currently available to stakeholders, however, is primarily confined to maximum or mean water level and does not include how often incursions are likely to occur. We propose to quantify the effect

Climate change doesn’t just threaten our natural resources—it threatens our cultural resources, too. Cultural resources represent evidence of past human activity, such as archeological sites, or are of significance to a group of people traditionally associated with the resource, such as Native American ceremonial sites. Climate change is challenging the long-term persistence of many cultural res

The distribution and abundance of cheatgrass, an invasive annual grass native to Eurasia, has increased substantially across the Intermountain West, including the Great Basin. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, and as it has expanded, the extent and frequency of fire in the Great Basin has increased by as much as 200%. These changes in fire regimes are associated with loss of the native sagebrush, gr

Mountain ecosystems are at risk from climate change and may be experiencing accelerated warming relative to lower environments. Understanding climatic and ecosystem processes at meso-, topo-, and micro-scales is limited, and constrains our ability to accurately evaluate vulnerability, and assess responses under future climates. Of special interest for climate studies are upper subalpine forests, t

Soil moisture is a critical variable for understanding the impacts of drought on ecological, hydrological, and agricultural systems. Yet, key research gaps currently prevent existing soil moisture measurements from being used to assess drought conditions and mitigate drought impacts such as wildfire outbreaks, lost agricultural production, and degraded wildlife habitat. In fact, most scales used t

In order to better document, manage, and adapt to the impacts of future climate variability and change on diverse natural resources in Hawaiʻi and the US Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI), several regional climate research programs including the Pacific RISA, the PICCC, the NOAA RCSD, and the East-West Center came together in 2011-2012 to collaboratively produce the Pacific Islands Regional Clima

The Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CLCC) Steering Committee (SC) recently made two landmark decisions providing direction for collaborative conservation efforts. The SC agreed to pursue landscape conservation design (LCD) as a major emphasis of collaborative work and they agreed to adopt a values-focused, structured decision-making (SDM) process to guide conservation design developm

California’s Central Valley is a nexus for water resources in the state, draining the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds. Urban centers, agricultural operations, and the environment all compete for limited water, and demand is expected to only increase as the population grows and agriculture intensifies. At the same time, the water supply is projected to decrease as temperatures rise, pre