Print PageClimate change challenges many of the basic assumptions routinely used by conservation planners and managers, including the assumption that conditions can be maintained in their current state or “restored” to a former state. Addressing these assumptions requires scientists and managers to collaborate and communicate at all stages of the scientific enterprise.
Results/Conclusions
The Southeast Climate Science Center (SE CSC), hosted by North Carolina State University, was established in 2010 to address the regional challenges presented by climate change and variability in the southeastern United States. As part of this effort the SE CSC has supported the Southeastern Regional Assessment Project (SERAP, http://serap.er.usgs.gov), a region-wide pilot project linking climate and land use change projections, including urbanization, with changes in hydrology, habitat, focal species of birds, fish, and mussels, as well as broader impacts such as sea level rise into a single integrated assessment framework. Downscaled climate projections produced as a part of SERAP are available through the GeoData Portal (http://cida.usgs.gov/climate/gdp). Additional data sets have also been compiled and include urbanization and vegetation succession projections, maps of projected habitat change, projected daily streamflows and stream temperature through 2100 for the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin, and models of inundation and erosion associated with sea-level rise.
In 2011 the SE CSC supported research to extend urban growth models completed as part of SERAP into the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks and Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC). Other supported work includes integrating urbanization into climate change models to evaluate the combined effect on tree pests and wildlife disease. Intermediate project updates indicate that shifts and abundance of insects can be predicted in urban heat islands and that species with the greatest thermal tolerance do best in urban areas. Additional SE CSC supported projects evaluated the vulnerability of sea turtles to climate change along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts and assessed the impact of changing ocean temperature and pH on the growth of reef building corals.
In 2012 the SE CSC short- and long-term science agendas were finalized and a call for proposals is being developed in coordination with LCCs to ensure that the SE CSC/LCC partnership will continue to focus on supporting research that informs management actions in the Southeast while furthering the state of climate change science.
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