Climate Change

USGS scientists are conducting research to understand how estuary fisheries are affected by the the timing and/or magnitude of freshwater discharge into Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana.

Eighteen USGS coastal scientists from all four coasts of the conterminous United States are working together to advance the understanding of climate change and sea-level rise impacts to coastal wetlands.

Mangrove forests have migrated inland over the past few decades at many locations along the northern Gulf coast. This expansion has been attributed to factors associated with climate change, such as increased salinity resulting from sea-level rise and longer intervals between winter freezes, which can kill cold-intolerant mangrove species.

USGS researchers will characterize extreme climatic events across U.S. following a review of case studies of mass mortality events associated with climate extremes including drought, precipitation, freeze, heat waves, and storm events.

USGS scientists will be analyzing weather surveillance radar observations of birds departing stopover habitats to measure responses to climate change.

Sudden Marsh Dieback - SMD - has been documented for the past two decades throughout coastal areas of the United States. With these large-scale diebacks comes the loss of ecosystem functions and services. USGS scientsts use field work and greenhouse studies to investigate the factors that control the resilience and resistance of coastal salt marshes to SMD.

WARC will assess Cape Sable seaside sparrow population response and viability under different management and habitat change scenarios. The USGS EverSparrow model will be run on future scenarios, and differences in the predicted probability of presence and the efficacy of varying conservation strategies will be evaluated.

Mole skinks that occur on Florida’s islands rely on sand beaches, beach berms, and dunes, making them particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surge. USGS researchers predicted the impacts of sea level rise and storm surge on habitat for the Florida Keys mole skink ( Plestiodon egregius egregius), the Cedar Key mole skink ( P. e. insularis), and the Egmont Key mole skink (known from a...

Researchers at WARC are determining if temporal mismatches between digital elevation models and land cover data can impact estimates of inundation of beach habitat for barrier islands and low-lying beaches off the Gulf Coast of Florida.

While islands are some of the most biodiverse places on earth, they are also among the most threatened. Researchers from WARC and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are assessing the vulnerability of Florida’s coastal islands to inundation from sea-level rise and estimating potential loss of the terrestrial biodiversity on Florida’s islands.

WARC researchers are working to quantify the impacts of future climate and land use/land cover change on greenhouse gas emissions and reductions.

Using temperature, species occurrence, field-based freeze damage data, and regression analyses for 84 invasive species, researchers at WARC are quantifying the species-specific relationships between minimum temperature and plant presence.