A brown bear hunts for salmon in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. USFS scientists are studying phenological impacts of climate change on salmon that affect fish availability for bears, birds, and other wildlife. The wolverine (far right) depends on areas with spring snow cover for dens and dispersal pathways. USFS researchers use models to predict how climate changes will affect such wildlife habitats and populations.
Credit: Wayne Owen
bird species by modeling habitats based on environmental variables and future climate scenarios (Prasad et al. 2009). “We have recently documented long-term shifts in elevational distribution of montane birds in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, along with correlations of bird abundance and reproductive success with temperature and precipitation,” says USFS scientist David King (King et al. 2008). Because future climates will likely stress wildlife habitat across the continent, the USFS is using projected climate-change data to map climateinduced shifts in habitat location, extent, and quality. Typically, states hoping to increase populations of species of conservation concern (such as the greater prairie-chicken) focus their conservation efforts on habitats expected to be under the greatest stress from climate change (such as the grasslandforest interface). However, USFS researchers studying first-generation State Wildlife Action Plans developed a terrestrial climate stress index, demonstrating that “the locations where current stressors were most pronounced did not overlap with the location of high future stress associated with climate change” (Joyce et al. 2008). Such information can help states prioritize conservation actions. Similarly, three researchers from the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station developed a climate adaptation tool called the System for Assessing Vulnerability of Species (SAVS), designed to help managers assess relative vulnerability or resilience
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The Wildlife Professional, Fall 2011
Credit: John Rohrer
of vertebrate species in habitats with changing climates (Bagne et al. 2011). The SAVS tool asks 22 questions about predictive criteria in four broad areas—habitat, physiology, phenology, and biotic interactions. The point total creates a relative vulnerability score, which in turn helps inform management action. Forest Service adaptation science incorporates historical data, habitat analyses, GIS mapping, radio telemetry, and genetic data. In studying wolverines in high-elevation forests of the northern Rocky Mountains and Cascade Range, for example, USFS researchers described the species’ bioclimatic envelope, evaluated landscape-level conservation genetics, and projected the potential effects of global warming on the extent and connectivity of wolverine habitat. They’ve found that the wolverine’s circumboreal range and dispersal corridors are limited by the distribution of spring snow cover, indicating that the species is highly susceptible to warming climates in the southern portions of its range (Aubry et al. 2007, Schwartz et al. 2009, Copeland et al. 2010, McKelvey et al. 2011). Looking forward, the Forest Service is, for the first time, applying various climate scenarios linked to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with three climate projections per scenario to project future forest and grassland conditions. This effort will be part of USFS’s Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment, a decadal analysis of water, wildlife, recreation,
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