Adapting to Climate Change: Why Places Matter: Ensuring Ecological Resiliency Dr. Mark Anderson Dir...
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Transcript of Adapting to Climate Change: Why Places Matter: Ensuring Ecological Resiliency Dr. Mark Anderson Dir...
Adapting to Climate Change:
Why Places Matter: Ensuring Ecological Resiliency
Dr. Mark AndersonDir of Conservation ScienceEastern US Conservation Region
Rose PaulDirector of Science and StewardshipVermont Chapter, Nature Conservancy
Two Countries, One ForestTwo Countries, One Forest
October 22, 2008October 22, 2008
Main Points
• Conserve the Stage, not the Actors – Understand the geophysical template
• Rebuild Site Resilience– Increasing resilience vs. abating threats
• Design Resilient Networks
Facing the Truth
• Multiple severe and unpredictable threats
• Shepherding ecosystems through a changing environment
• “maintaining a capacity for renewal in a dynamic environment provides an ecological buffer that protects the system from the failure of management actions that are taken based upon incomplete understanding, and it allows managers to affordably learn and change.” Definition of resiliency from Gunderson 2000
The Eastern US Conservation Region: 14 States, 3 Provinces,13,530 Species:
8,223 plants,5,307 animals,523 vulnerable
-functional extinction: chestnut, wolf, cougar, woodland caribou
-presently 31% of flora and 10% of vertebrate fauna are exotic
-hundreds of species range shifts
Overlay of Secured Areas on the Biophysical Settings
Collected 41 variables for each state: geology, landforms, elevation, temperature, precipitation, shoreline etc.
Species Richness: Actual vs. Predicted# of Geology Types + # of Elevation Zones + Amount of Calcareous Bedrock + Maximum Hardiness
Zone - Degree Longitude
CTDE
MA
MD
ME
NB NH
NJ
NS
NY
OH
PA
PE
RI
VA
VT
WV
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000
Predicted
Act
ual
All Species R2 = 0.953
Species Richness# of Bedrock types, Latitude, Elevation range and Amount of
calcareous substrate
A
ctua
l Ric
hnes
s
Predicted Species Richness
Anderson 2008 in prep, Based on the best-fit a stepwise regression of 42 variables
R2 = 0.94* P = 0.0000008
Ecosystems in the Northeast Portfolios
Forests
Riparian
Tidal marsh & Beach
Steep slopes \ Cliffs
Rivers & Stream
Coves
Summits
Freshwater wetlands
These aren’t going to move.How do we facilitate their change?
Focus on Ecosystems types based on setting and structure
Create arenas for evolution not museums of the past.
-At any one place the exact composition is going to change but the feature is not going to move and its significance to biodiversity will remain.
OLD: Cattail (Typha latifolia) – Marsh Marigold (Caltha palustris) marshCattail (Typha angustifolia, latifolia) – Bullrusch (Shoenoplectus spp.) marsh
NEW:Freshwater marsh ecosystem on shale at low elevation. Freshwater marsh ecosystem on granite at high elevation
Summits in the Northeast Portfolios
Sedimentary
Intermediate (mafic)Sedimentary
Mafic -low
Granite
Mixed
Granite
Rebuilding Site Resilience
• Allowing for Dynamics– Protect adequate space
• Nurturing sources of Renewal – How does the ecosystem recover?
• Preserving Options: the role of diversity– Many species confer resilience
Increasing Resiliency vs. Abating Threats
Bubble Boy = no resilience, no capacity to recover, no immune system, fragile
Strategy = permanent threat abatement • Requires anticipating and abating each and
every threat
Wolverine = infinite resilience, Cells regrow instantly, Absorbs all threats and recovers instantly
(albeit painfully)
How do we convert bubble boy into wolverine?
Nurture Sources of Renewal
• Accumulated capital that provide sources for recovery – (soils, structures, seed banks, legacies)
• Key science questions that need research
Tip-up mounds
Snags
Multiple layers of coarse woody debris
Mixed canopy & understory
Full Biodiversityfungi, inverts, etc
Seed Banks
Legacies and Aquatics: dissipates energy, traps litter, creates pools, releases nutrients. higher diversity & higher quality spawning habitat.
The Role of Biodiversity
• Functional groups – species combine to form an overlapping set of
reinforcing influences– Diverse system spread risk and retain over all
consistency in performance independent of wide fluctuations in individual species
– Exact composition and abundance is going to change - it has to.
Main Points
• Increase Resilience vs. Abate Threats
• Conserve the Stage, not the Actors – understanding the geophysical template
• Rebuild Site Resilience
• Design Resilient Networks – Redundancy, Dispersed Replicates