Community vulnerability and climate change Jason Kreitler, USGS

Various projects ongoing Geography of climate change – mostly ecological – Vulnerability and how to adapt? Community vulnerability to wildland fire – Socioecological – Less climate change

Impacts of climate change on communities Important general questions: – Is climate changing? – How, where, and at what rate? – What are the effects? – What are the threats? – How do those threats affect people & communities? – Changes in magintude and timing of temp & precip, vegetation distrubution and phenology – Drought, changes in severity and length of fire season, flooding, sea level rise, snowmelt timing – Direct exposure to threats, changes to agricultural production, changes in ecosystem services, cultural disruption, economic disruption, conflict

Global CO2 emissions – IPCC 4 th assessment Raupach et al PNAS A2 B1: stabilizing population, rapid technology conversion growing population, high carbon energy sources

IPCC 2007, Fig Projections of future temperature – IPCC 4 th assessment A2B1

Bay Area climate summer max temperature precipitation water deficit winter min temperature PRISM climate layers downscaled to 270 m by Al and Lorrie Flint, USS

Climatic Water Deficit: excess evaporative demand relative to available water PET depends on temperature and insolation Water availability depends on precipitation, soil storage and runoff CWD courtesy: Al and Lorrie Flint, USGS see Stephenson 1998 J. Biogeog.

Diana Stalberg et al PLoS ONE (PRBO)Will Cornwell et al. in prep. (UC Berkeley) Several, independent approaches to vegetation modeling agree: future climates favor shrub and grassland at the expense of forest ‘Random forest’ model of CalVeg types 800 m resolution, UCSC regional climate model Predictive vegetation modeling of Bay Area vegetation 270 m downscaled climate, GFDL mid-century future forest remaining forest  woodland forest  shrubland

Relative probability of vegetation transition (GFDL A2, mid-century vs. present) The vulnerability of vegetation types is very patchy: high probabilities of change occur where vegetation patches are near the edge of their climate envelope W. Cornwell et al. in prep.

Native vegetation transitions vs. alien invasions vegetation transitions depend on: 1)mortality of existing mature plants 2)propagule sources for new species source: Larry Workman QIN, Panoramio.com ?

Agents of mortality: Disease source: UC Davis; Sudden oak death source: Center for Invasive Species Research UC Riverside

Agents of mortality: Drought and pests piñon pine mortality credit: Craig Allen, USGS

Agents of mortality: Fire Historical probability of fire (climate-driven model) (A2) (A2) 16 GCM ensemble (A2 scenario): change relative to historical period Figures: courtesy Meg Krawchuck and Max Mortiz, UC Berkeley Historical: Parisien and Moritz 2009 Ecol. Monogr. Futures: Moritz et al. in review

Cohesive Strategy 3 Phases Just finished Phase 2 Next, how to quantify for national tradeoff analysis

Fire adapted human community conceptual diagrams