Climate Change

USGS science plays an essential role in helping natural resource managers, communities, and policy makers prepare and mitigate for changing environmental conditions.

To better understand the environmental drivers of methane emissions in tidal saltmarsh, tidal freshwater swamp forest, tidal freshwater marsh, and non-tidal freshwater marsh habitats, researchers are collecting observations of CH4 emissions and porewater concentrations at research sites representative of each of these habitats.

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

WARC's wetland carbon cycle science team is working to improve model parameterizations and formulations and reduce forecast uncertainty in ecosystem modeling.

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.

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

WARC researchers sampled anuran populations at sites within Big Thicket National Preserve to explore saltwater intrusion on these populations.

Estuaries and their surrounding wetlands are coastal transition zones where freshwater rivers meet tidal seawater. As sea levels rise, tidal forces move saltier water farther upstream, extending into freshwater wetland areas. Human changes to the surrounding landscape may amplify the effects of this tidal extension, impacting the resiliency and function of the upper estuarine wetlands. One visible...

South Florida's pine rockland ecosystem represents less than 3% of its original extent. This project will evaluate habitat conditions for two pine rockland snake species to develop future habitat condition scenarios for Species Status Assessments.

A USGS forecasting tool helps Everglades natural resource managers identify management actions that can benefit one or more species while quantifying the potential costs to others.

The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s Coastal Master Plan is a blueprint for responding to environmental changes. As part of the agency’s continued engagement, USGS supports model developments and improvements for the 2023 Coastal Master Plan.

National Wildlife Refuges provide habitat for important fish and wildlife species and services that benefit coastal communities, like storm-surge protection. USGS scientists are helping coastal refuges plan for and adapt to sea-level rise.