Climate Change

USGS researchers will utilize long-term soil elevation change data to help advance understanding of soil elevation dynamics and ecological transformations due to climate change within coastal wetlands of the Greater Everglades.

USGS scientists are working with partners at the Puget Sound Partnership and the State of Washington’s Department of Ecology to develop two new tools to help us understand how human disturbance affects life at the top of Puget Sound: a Marine Benthic Index and a graphical causal model.

Researchers at WARC will use data and models to produce probabilistic maps of current and future wetland inundation, coastal wetland extent, and coastal and wetland trangression.

USGS researchers will examine how hydrology and landscape vegetation changes impact Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow survival and population growth.

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...