Adaptive management and strategic habitat conservation become increasingly important as evidence accumulates that anthropogenic climate change may cause shifts in the distribution of habitats and the species dependent on them. Natural resource managers are beginning to contemplate a future in which the management prescription for suitable species habitat in a conservation area changes through time. This necessary planning will require effective strategies to mitigate and adapt to the indirect effects of climate change as manifested in landscape dynamics.

Results/Conclusions

We use the Vegetation Dynamics Development Tool (VDDT) and the Tool for Exploratory Landscape Scenario Analyses (TELSA) to simulate landscape change in the Southern Atlantic Coast in the 21st century. The VDDT and TELSA models stochastically model disturbance and vegetation succession. In this project, we use a detailed land cover map from the Southeast Gap Analysis Project as the baseline for developing habitat models. A regression model is developed to relate climatic variables to historic fire frequency. This informs our fire frequency projections based on output from twelve Global Climate Models using three potential CO₂ emission scenarios. These data are integrated into the TELSA and VDDT modeling framework with other major drivers of landscape change such as timber management, urbanization, and sea level rise. Model results for one system, Atlantic Coastal Plain upland longleaf pine, indicate that under a business as usual emissions scenario mid- and late-open stage habitat is resilient to increased fire frequency while the projected fire disturbance regime does not favor the development of early open habitat. Other emission scenarios result in more early open stage habitat and either static or declining areas of mid- and late-open stage habitat. In this presentation we describe the spatial and temporal dynamics for a group of representative ecological systems in the Southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain.