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Scenarios of future land use change around United States’ protected areas
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Land use change around protected areas can diminish their conservation value, making it important to
predict future land use changes nearby. Our goal was to evaluate future land use changes around protected
areas of different types in the United States under different socioeconomic scenarios. We analyzed
econometric-based projections of future land use change to capture changes around 1260 protected
areas, including National Forests, Parks, Refuges, and Wilderness Areas, from 2001 to 2051, under different
land use policies and crop prices. Our results showed that urban expansion around protected areas
will continue to be a major threat, and expand by 67% under business-as-usual conditions.
Concomitantly, a substantial number of protected areas will lose natural vegetation in their surroundings.
National land-use policies or changes in crop prices are not likely to affect the overall pattern of land use,
but can have effects in certain regions. Discouraging urbanization through zoning, for example, can
reduce future urban pressures around National Forests and Refuges in the East, while the implementation
of an afforestation policy can increase the amount of natural vegetation around some Refuges throughout
the U.S. On the other hand, increases in crop prices can increase crop/pasture cover around some protected
areas, and limit the potential recovery of natural vegetation. Overall, our results highlight that future
land-use change around protected areas is likely to be substantial but variable among regions and
protected area types. Safeguarding the conservation value of protected areas may require serious consideration of threats and opportunities arising from future land use.
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Are conservation organizations configured for effective adaptation to global change?
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Conservation organizations must adapt to respond to the ecological impacts of global change. Numerous
changes to conservation actions (eg facilitated ecological transitions, managed relocations, or increased corridordevelopment) have been recommended, but some institutional restructuring within organizations may also be needed. Here we discuss the capacity of conservation organizations to adapt to changing environmental
conditions, focusing primarily on public agencies and nonprofits active in land protection and management
in the US. After first reviewing how these organizations anticipate and detect impacts affecting target
species and ecosystems, we then discuss whether they are sufficiently flexible to prepare and respond by reallocating funding, staff, or other resources. We raise new hypotheses about how the configuration of different
organizations enables them to protect particular conservation targets and manage for particular biophysical
changes that require coordinated management actions over different spatial and temporal scales. Finally, we
provide a discussion resource to help conservation organizations assess their capacity to adapt.
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Climate change and the ecologist
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The evidence for rapid climate change now seems overwhelming. Global temperatures are predicted to rise by up to 4 °C by 2100, with associated alterations in precipitation patterns. Assessing the consequences for biodiversity, and how they might be mitigated, is a Grand Challenge in ecology.
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Conservation VALUE OF ROADLESS AREAS FOR VULNERABLE FISH AND Wildlife Species in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, Montana
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The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem is one of the most spectacular landscapes
in the world and most ecologically intact ecosystem remaining in the
contiguous United States. Straddling the Continental Divide in the heart of the
Rocky Mountains, the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem extends for >250
miles from the fabled Blackfoot River valley in northwest Montana north to Elk
Pass south of Banff and Kootenay National Parks in Canada. It reaches from
the short-grass plains along the eastern slopes of the Rockies westward nearly
100 miles to the Flathead and Kootenai River valleys. The Crown sparkles with
a variety of dramatic landscapes, clean sources of blue waters, and diversity of
plants and animals.Over the past century, citizens and government leaders have worked hard to
save the core of this splendid ecosystem in Montana by establishing world-class
parks and wildernesses – coupled with conservation of critical wildlife habitat
on state and private lands along the periphery. These include jewels such as
Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall-Scapegoat-Great Bear Wilderness,
the first-ever Tribal Wilderness in the Mission Mountains, numerous State of
Montana Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), and vital private lands through
land trusts such as The Nature Conservancy. Their combined efforts have
protected 3.3 million acres and constitute a truly impressive commitment to
conservation. It was a remarkable legacy and great gift …but, in the face of new
challenges, it may not have been enough.
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Climate change impacts on the biophysics and economics of world fisheries
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Global marine fisheries are underperforming economically because of overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation. Added to these threats is the looming challenge of climate change. Observations, experiments and simulation models show that climate change would result in changes in primary productivity, shifts in distribution and changes in the potential yield of exploited marine species, resulting in impacts on the economics of fisheries worldwide. Despite the gaps in understanding climate change effects on fisheries, there is sufficient scientific information that highlights the need to implement climate change mitigation
and adaptation policies to minimize impacts on fisheries.
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Challenges in the conservation, rehabilitation and recovery of native stream salmonid populations: beyond the 2010 Luarca symposium
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– In May 2010, I chaired a session on challenges to salmonid conservation at the international symposium
‘Advances in the population ecology of stream salmonids’ in Luarca, Spain. I suggested that in addition to scientific challenges, a major challenge will be improving the links between ecologists, conservationists and policy makers. Because the Luarca symposium focused mainly on ecological research, little time was explicitly devoted to conservation. My objective in this paper is to further discuss the role of ecological research in informing salmonid conservation. I begin with a brief overview of research highlights from the symposium. I then use selected examples to show that ecological research has already contributed much towards informing salmonid conservation, but that ecologists will always be faced with limitations in their predictive ability. I suggest that conservation will need to move forward regardless of these limitations, and I call attention to some recent efforts wherein ecological research has played a crucial role. I conclude that ecologists should take urgent action to ensure that their results are availableto inform resource managers, conservation organisations and policy makers regarding past losses and present threats to native, locally-adapted salmonid stocks.
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Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets
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Climate targets are designed to inform policies that would limit the
magnitude and impacts of climate change caused by anthropogenic
emissions of greenhouse gases and other substances. The target
that is currently recognized by most world governments1 places a
limit of two degrees Celsius on the global mean warming since
preindustrial times. This would require large sustained reductions
in carbon dioxide emissions during the twenty-first century and
beyond2–4. Such a global temperature target, however, is not sufficient
to control many other quantities, such as transient sea level
rise5
, ocean acidification6,7 and net primary production on land8,9.
Here, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity
(EMIC) in an observation-informed Bayesian approach, we show
that allowable carbon emissions are substantially reduced whenmultiple
climate targets are set. We take into account uncertainties in
physical and carbon cycle model parameters, radiative efficiencies10,
climate sensitivity11 and carbon cycle feedbacks12,13 along with a
large set of observational constraints. Within this framework, we
explore a broad range of economically feasible greenhouse gas scenarios
from the integrated assessment community14–17 to determine
the likelihood of meeting a combination of specific global
and regional targets under various assumptions. For any given
likelihood of meeting a set of such targets, the allowable cumulative
emissions are greatly reduced from those inferred from the temperature
target alone. Therefore, temperature targets alone are unable
to comprehensively limit the risks from anthropogenic emissions.
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Adaptation: Planning for Climate Change and Its Effects on Federal Lands
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National forest managers are charged with tackling the effects of climate change on the natural resources
under their care. The Forest Service National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change and the Climate
Change Performance Scorecard require managers to make significant progress in addressing climate
change by 2015. To help land managers meet this challenge, Forest Service scientists conducted three case studies on national forests and adjacent national parks and documented a wide range of scientific issues and solutions. They summarized the scientific foundation for climate change adaptation and made the information accessible to land managers by creating a climate change adaptation guidebookand web portal. Case study teams discovered that collaboration among scientists and land managers is crucial to adaptation planning, as are management plans targeted to the particular ecosystem conditions and management priorities of each region. Many current management practices are consistent with climate change
adaptation goals. Because timely implementation is critical, strategies are in development at the national
level to speed the implementation of science-based climate change adaptation processes in national
forests throughout the country.
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Biotic Drivers of Stream Planform: Implications for Understanding the Past and Restoring the Future
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Traditionally, stream channel planform has been viewed as a function of larger watershed and valley-scale physical variables, including valley slope, the amount of discharge, and sediment size and load. Biotic processes serve a crucial role in transforming channel planform among straight, braided, meandering, and anabranching styles by increasing stream-bank stability and the probability of avulsions, creating stable multithread (anabranching) channels, and affecting sedimentation dynamics. We review the role of riparian vegetation and channel-spanning obstructions—beaver dams and logjams—in altering channel–floodplain dynamics in the southern Rocky Mountains, and we present channel planform scenarios for combinations of vegetation and beaver populations or old-growth forest that control logjam formation. These conceptual models provide understanding of historical planform variability throughout the Holocene and outline the implications for stream restoration or management in broad, low-gradient headwater valleys, which are important for storing sediment, carbon, and nutrients and for supporting a diverse riparian community.
Keywords: stream planform, riparian vegetation, beaver, old-growth forest, restoration
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Assessing the impacts of livestock production on biodiversity in rangeland ecosystems
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Biodiversity in rangelands is decreasing, due to intense utilization for livestock production and conversion of rangeland into cropland; yet the outlook of rangeland biodiversity has not been considered in view of future global demand for food. Here we assess the impact of future livestock production on the global rangelands area and their biodiversity. First we formalized exist- ing knowledge about livestock grazing impacts on biodiversity, expressed in mean species abundance (MSA) of the original rangeland native species assemblages, through metaanalysis of peer-reviewed literature. MSA values, ranging from 1 in natural rangelands to 0.3 in man-made grasslands, were entered in the IMAGE-GLOBIO model. This model was used to assess the impact of change in food demand and livestock production on future rangeland biodiversity. The model revealed remarkable regional variation in impact on rangeland area and MSA between two agricultural production scenarios. The area of used rangelands slightly increases globally between 2000 and 2050 in the baseline scenario and reduces under a scenario of enhanced uptake of resource-efficient production technologies increasing production [high levels of agricultural knowledge, science, and technology (high-AKST)], particularly in Africa. Both scenarios suggest a global decrease in MSA for rangelands until 2050. The contribution of livestock grazing to MSA loss is, however, expected to diminish after 2030, in particular in Africa under the high-AKST scenario. Policies fostering agricultural intensification can reduce the overall pressure on rangeland biodiversity, but additional measures, addressing factors such as climate change and infrastructural development, are necessary to totally halt biodiversity loss.
dose-response model | intactness | land use
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