Making vegetation model projections usable by managers

Background/Question/Methods

For two decades, the MC1 vegetation modeling team has been generating projections of vegetation shifts, carbon sequestration trends, fire hazard at local (Yosemite and Wind Cave National Parks), country-wide, continental, and even global scales. Land managers and natural resource practitioners are now faced with addressing global environmental change threats and searching for impacts projections.  Here we describe 3 different ways we are making our model results relevant to managers.

Results/Conclusions

First, we are extracting information that can be used to modify transition probabilities in the state and transition models (STMs) widely used by Forest Service and Nature Conservancy land managers.  For example, future drought-driven fire frequency may increase and modify succession patterns and can be used to transform probability distributions in STMs.  Similarly, projected new vegetation types/species may need to be included in the initial list of species associated with a particular landscape.

Second, we are transforming model results, such as the carbon pools of live and dead plant components, into wildlife habitat characteristics, and calculating a vigor index based on those carbon pools that can relate to their vulnerability to insect outbreaks.

Third, we are uploading all our model results from the last 20 years onto www.databasin.org, Conservation Biology Institute's data sharing and manipulation web site.  Data Basin accepts netCDF formatted files that can be animated and visualized on-line, imparting more information than simple maps do.

We report on our progress in making model results available to and usable by managers.