Preparing for climate change in northern Great Plains national parks: Lessons learned from various approaches

Background/Question/Methods

Working with scientists, National Park Service (NPS) managers use a variety of approaches to explore and understand potential effects and impacts of climate change on the species and ecosystems for which they are responsible.  These approaches must provide managers the information they need to identify and prioritize no-regrets actions to avoid or reduce adverse impacts in any plausible future scenario.  The approaches must also identify how benefits and detriments of specific management actions might vary across different climate situations so that management planning includes adequate flexibility to accommodate the great uncertainties inherent in climate change.  Over the last five years, two national parks in the northern Great Plains have used scenario planning, a literature-based vulnerability assessment, and quantitative modeling to inform their climate change adaptation planning.  What did managers find useful from these exercises, what were the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches for these parks, and what other lessons did managers and scientists learn?

Results/Conclusions

All three approaches provided managers a structured opportunity to think about climate change impacts on their parks.  The partnering between managers and scientists in all approaches also provided critical information exchange regarding the state of knowledge and the priorities and realities of management.  The scenario planning exercise forced managers to consider all aspects of their parks influenced by climate, and the requirement to construct divergent scenarios made managers and scientists alike consider futures very different from what they normally would.  The reliance on expert opinion to construct these scenarios raised questions about the plausibility of the futures considered, highlighting an inherent tension between needing specific information for decision-making and acknowledging that uncertainties will always exist.  The climate change vulnerability assessment provided a comprehensive compilation of information about projected climate change and its potential effects for the parks’ specific region, but it provided minimal guidance for future management.  Quantitative modeling allowed managers to test effects of management-climate interactions on future vegetation, but limitations of the model left many questions unanswered.  Perhaps the greatest lesson learned is that these three approaches need to be used together to take advantage of each one’s strengths and compensate for each one’s weaknesses.