1. APPLYING FOREST SIMULATION MODELING TO TEST THE IMPACT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE ON SELECTED ECOSYSTEMS AT TWO MOUNTAIN TRANSECTS IN NEVADA Mike Hay, Franco Biondi, Jimmie Chew, Robin Tausch

2. Presentation Outline  Purpose  Simulation model  Data  Directions/Work to be done This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

3. Purpose Main objective: insert climate into models used by resource managers This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

4. Vegetation depends on succession, disturbance, and climate (plus humans) This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372 Grazing Altered Fire Regime Climate Change P-J Expansion 1 2 3 5 4 Fire Suppression 6

5. How do we combine records (instrumental and proxy) with simulation models? Recent observations show a strong east-west gradient in wildfires across Lincoln County (Dilts et al. 2009) However, long-term fire history data show that this gradient may be a recent phenomenon (Biondi et al. 2011)

6. SIMPPLLE is an acronym for: Jimmie Chew and Kirk Moeller, USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula MT

7. Simulation model  http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/missoula/4151/SIMPPLLE/index.html This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

8.  HANDLE DISTURBANCE PROCESSES AS STOCHASTIC EVENTS  CAPTURE THE INTERACTION BETWEEN VEGETATION PATTERNS AND DISTURBANCE PROCESSES  PROVIDE FOR A QUANTIFICATION OF THE RANGE OF VARIABILITY FOR BOTH VEGETATION CONDITIONS AND DISTURBANCE PROCESSES  IMPROVE OUR ABILITY TO IDENTIFY DESIRED FUTURE CONDITIONS OF BOTH VEGETATION CONDITIONS AND LEVELS OF DISTURBANCE PROCESSES  INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE FROM RESEARCH STUDIES, FINE SCALE MODELS AND EXPERT OPINION SIMPPLLE was developed as a management tool to:

9. Spatially and temporally explicit This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372 Great Basin Pinyon- Juniper Woodland Barren Inter-Mountain Basins Big Sagebrush Shrubland Inter-Mountain Basins Curl-leaf Mountain Mahogany Woodland and Shrubland

10. Data  LANDFIRE  National Fire Occurrence database (NFO)  Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) Climate Data  Bias Corrected, Spatially Downscaled (BCSD) Global Circulation Model (GCM) projections  Digital Elevation Model (DEM) This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

11. LANDFIRE This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372  Vegetation:  Type  Canopy density  Canopy height

12. National Fire Occurrence database This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372  Fire occurrences  1986 – 1996  Area burned

13. PRISM  Suitable Climate Space This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

14. PRISM  Upper and lower bounds for temperature and precipitation This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

15. BCSD GCM  GCM cell size is large  At this latitude: ~320 km x 280km This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

16. BCSD GCM U.S. DOI Bureau of Reclamation Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Santa Clara University Civil Engineering Department Climate Central Scripps Institution of Oceanography U.S. Geological Survey U.S. DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources California-Nevada Applications Program California Climate Change Center This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

17. National Elevation Dataset This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372  USGS  10 meter resolution

18. Directions/Work to be done  Refining pathways and system logic This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

19. Directions/Work to be done  Refining pathways and system logic This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

20. Directions/Work to be done  Refining pathways and system logic This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372

21. Questions? This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. EPS-0814372