Source: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON submitted to NRP
CLIMATE CHANGE VULNERABILITY IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: A COMPARISON OF THREE APPROACHES
Sponsoring Institution
Other Cooperating Institutions
Project Status
COMPLETE
Funding Source
STATE
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
0232793
Grant No.
(N/A)
Cumulative Award Amt.
(N/A)
Proposal No.
(N/A)
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Sep 22, 2012
Project End Date
Jan 31, 2015
Grant Year
(N/A)
Program Code
[(N/A)]- (N/A)
Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE
SEATTLE,WA 98195
Performing Department
Wildlife Science
Non Technical Summary
Climate change has already begun to affect many plants and animals. However, not all species are responding to climate change in similar ways. Some plants and animals will be more susceptible to changes in climate than will others. Understanding which species will be most vulnerable to climate change and why will be crucial for managing natural resources and public lands including fish and game, timber species, national parks, and wildlife in general. This project compares three different approaches for determining which species will be most vulnerable to climate change. We will compare approaches that rely heavily on the opinions of experts to other approaches that rely more heavily on computer models that predict how species will respond to climate change. The outcomes of the project will include a better understanding of how to assess the vulnerability of plants and animals to climate change and rankings of the relative vulnerability to climate change of species in the Pacific Northwest.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
13604302090100%
Knowledge Area
136 - Conservation of Biological Diversity;

Subject Of Investigation
0430 - Climate;

Field Of Science
2090 - Statistics, econometrics, and biometrics;
Goals / Objectives
The objective of this study is to compare three approaches to assessing the vulnerability to climate change of species and ecological systems in the Pacific Northwest. Our results will provide a better understanding of how assessments are likely to differ, where the largest uncertainties in those assessments lie, and which assessments might be best suited to particular purposes. Products will include a cross-border (Canada and the US) map of current vegetation patterns for the study region, projected changes in the area of climatically suitable habitat for 100 vertebrate species, 13 tree species, and 12-20 vegetation types for 8-10 different climate-change scenarios, climate projections derived from two downscaling approaches, maps and tables of the vulnerability to climate change of species and ecological systems calculated using three different approaches, and at least one peer-reviewed article on the comparison of vulnerability assessment approaches. All data and products will be made publicly available on some combination of websites hosted by the University of Washington, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Project Methods
This project will leverage several of the products of an ongoing vulnerability assessment being conducted for the Pacific Northwest (PNW). This larger project will produce the downscaled climate data and modeled species range shifts that we will use in the current project. We will compare the results of three different approaches to assessing the vulnerability to climate change of 100 vertebrate species, 13 tree species, and 12-20 vegetation types using 8-10 different future climate scenarios. This comparison will include approaches that 1) integrate expert-opinion-based assessments of climate sensitivities with projected changes in climate, 2) use empirical model projections to forecast potential climate-driven shifts in species distributions, and 3) combine measures of climate breadth and projected climatic changes. We will compare the relative ranking of species and systems based on their vulnerabilities as assessed by the three different approaches. Although the vulnerability of more species will be assessed with any one of the three assessment approaches, given the limited overlap between the sets of species for which we can obtain data for all three approaches (largely due to the difficulty in gathering the natural history information required by the sensitivity database) we will likely be able to compare the three approaches for 100 vertebrates, 13 tree species, and 12-20 ecological systems. We will explore methods for comparing the relative uncertainty in results of the different approaches generated by uncertainties in expert opinions (these are recorded in the sensitivity database), the variability in projected climatic differences, and the errors in the distribution models (as assessed with reserved test datasets not used in the building of the models).

Progress 09/22/12 to 01/31/15

Outputs
Target Audience: Target audiences included climate change researchers, wildlife scientists, land managers, educators, students, and the general public. Changes/Problems: Although we had aimed to compare vulnerabilities of over 100 species using the three approaches, we were only able to fully analyze 76 species. This was in part due to a lack of key information in the species sensitivity database and our inability to build wellfitting niche models for as many species as we had anticipated. In addition, early on in the project, we decided to focus exclusively on species vulnerabilities and not on ecological systems. We found that we had much better data for individual species than we did for ecological systems. Finally, one of the products that we listed in our original project proposal was cross-boarder climate-change induced vegetation-change projections. These were being produced as part of the larger Pacific Northwest Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment. We did, indeed incorporate these projections into some of our niche modeling as well as into our sensitivity-exposure-based approach. However, as of the writing of this report, our USGS collaborator has still not released these data to the public and so we are unable to deliver these data layers at this time. When they become available, we will provide a link to these layers on the Pacific Northwest Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment website. We are still working on comparisons of the three approaches that draw on the more comprehensive measure of climatic departure. We have finished the calculations of climatic departure, but have not, to date, compared vulnerabilities a based on these rankings. This is a next step. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? To date, our outreach efforts have included, eight presentations, five papers that are either in review or are in preparation, and a contribution to a National Wildlife Federation report. We have plans to share the results of these analyses with the North Pacific and Great Northern LCCs as well as with Idaho Fish and Game and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife through our collaborators in those two agencies. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? The overall goal of this project was to compare three different approaches for assessing vulnerability to climate change. We compared rankings of species vulnerabilities based on 1) niche-model-based changes in species distributions, 2) expert-opinion-based sensitivity and exposure, and 3) measures of climatic breadth (the variation in climate across a species current distribution) and climatic departure (the degree to which climates across a species’ range are likely to diverge from current conditions). As a result of this project, we developed and produced the following. 1. Two new metrics for assessing vulnerability (climatic breadth and climatic departure). 2. Maps depicting spatial variation in climatic conditions (climatic breadth) across 400 species ranges. 3. Maps depicting the spatial distribution of vulnerability to climate change for 76 species based on both expert-opinion on climate-change sensitivities and projected changes in climate across species’ ranges. 4. Rankings of species’ vulnerabilities based on three different approaches to assessing vulnerability. 5. We also produced maps of projected changes in species’ distributions and changes in vegetation—however these products were leveraged from other funding sources. Perhaps the most important conclusion that can be drawn from our study is that planners and managers should not rely on a single measure of vulnerability. Our results show that by examining projected changes in species’ distributions, expert knowledge of species’ sensitivities, and current climate breadths occupied by species can lead to very different conclusions about how vulnerable species are likely to be to climate change. A more robust approach to assessing vulnerability would draw on multiple lines of evidence. For example, overlaying maps of projected range shifts, sensitivity-exposure-based vulnerability, and climatic breadth or exposure would provide an estimate of where anyone of the three approaches project high vulnerability and where all three of the approaches project lower vulnerability. Our results also highlight the fact that vulnerability assessments are likely to be relatively robust despite a range of future climate projections. Thus managers and planners may need to worry less about the diversity of future climate-change projections than they do about exploring multiple indicators of vulnerability. However, it is important to note that our comparison only drew on two different climate-change projections—had we explored more projections, it is possible that we may have found greater differences and would have concluded that it was more important to consider multiple future climates when assessing vulnerability.

Publications

  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Rinnan, S. D., 2014. Quantifying Sensitivity and exposure to climate change in western North American Species. Pacific Northwest Climate Science Conference, Seattle.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Rinnan, S. D., 2014. Quantifying Sensitivity and exposure to climate change in western North American Species. School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences Graduate Student Symposium, Seattle.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Rinnan, S. D. 2014. Quantifying Sensitivity and exposure to climate change in western North American Species. Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management Seminar, Seattle.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Rinnan, S. D. 2014. Quantifying Sensitivity and exposure to climate change in western North American Species. Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Rinnan, D. S. and J. J. Lawler. In preparation. Using climate breadth to quantify species vulnerability to climate change. Target journal: Global Change Biology.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Michalak, J. L., M. J. Case, J. G. R. Langdon, D. S. Rinnan, R. Beach, E. Gray, F. Saltre, J. M. Scott, S. Shafer, L. Svencara, B. Thompson, and J. J. Lawler. In preparation. Comparing three approaches to assessing species vulnerability to climate change. Target journal: Global Change Biology.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Michalak, J. L., M. J. Case, and J. J. Lawler. In preparation. Sensitivity, exposure, and vulnerability of species to climate change. Target journal: Conservation Biology.
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Glick, P., L. Helbrecht, J. J. Lawler, and M. J. Case. 2013. Safeguarding Washingtons Fish and Wildlife in an Era of Climate Change: A Case Study of Partnerships in Action, National Wildlife Federation, Seattle, WA.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Case, M. J. 2014. Climate-related risks for Western forests, Northwest Wood-Based Biofuels + Co-Products Conference, Seattle.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Case, M. J. 2013. Adaptation options for forested systems in the Sierra Nevada. Sierra Nevada Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Strategies workshop. Sacramento, CA.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2014 Citation: Langdon, J. G. R. and J. J. Lawler. In review. Assessing the impacts of projected climate change on biodiversity in the protected areas of western North America. Ecosphere.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2014 Citation: Case, M. J. and J. J. Lawler. In review. Relative sensitivity to climate change of species in the Pacific Northwest, North America. Biological Conservation.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Case, M. J., J. J. Lawler, and J. Tomasevic. 2014. Relative climate change sensitivity of species in the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Northwest Climate Conference, Seattle.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Michalak, J. L. 2014. Evaluating Climate Change Vulnerability in the Pacific Northwest: Integrated Assessments of Potential Ecological Change in Three Case Study Landscapes. Pacific Northwest Climate Conference, Seattle.