CASC Drought Research Highlights

Major Research Themes 

• Drought as a driver of ecological transformation 
• Incorporating indigenous knowledge into broader understanding of drought adaptations 
• Water management under drought conditions 
• Drought planning and preparedness in communities 
• Developing community resistance/resilience to drought 
• Developing tools to assess and predict droughts (particularly related to streams/rivers) 
• Impacts of droughts on wildlife, including birds, fish, and ungulates 
• Connection between droughts and fires 

Cross-CASC Drought Initiatives

Ecological Drought Across the Country 

Historically, drought has been most often viewed in terms of its agricultural, hydrological, and socioeconomic impacts, rather than how it effects ecosystems. The National Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCASC) led a national-scale initiative to address this gap in ecological drought research. In collaboration with all eight regional CASCs and NGO partners such as The Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society, the NCASC launched an ecological drought working group to understand the natural and human dimensions of ecological drought, hosted a series of regional Ecological Drought Workshops to discuss the effects of ecological droughts on ecosystems within each CASC region, and held a webinar series discussing CASC research on the topic. 

State of the Science: Synthesis on Transformational Drought  

Prolonged periods of water scarcity can fundamentally alter the composition, structure, and function of ecosystems. Managers of American public lands have expressed a need for baseline science to support their decision-making processes about how to best manage the ecological impacts of these transformational droughts in the 21st century. This wide-scale collaboration between the National and regional CASCs brings together teams of scientists and federal land managers, including representatives from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and U.S. Forest Service, to synthesize what is known about understanding, predicting, and mitigating transformational drought. Ultimately, this research will provide solutions-oriented science to help resource managers prepare for ecosystem impacts of future water scarcity. 

Project Highlights 

Hawai’i Drought Knowledge Exchange

CASC Science: The Hawai‘i Drought Knowledge Exchange project, funded by the Pacific Islands CASC, has been successfully piloting three sets of formal collaborative knowledge exchanges between researchers and managers to co-produce customized, site specific drought data products to meet the needs of their partners.  

Applications: Through these pilots, knowledge co-production has demonstrated how active collaboration between researchers and managers in the design and production of data products can lead to more useful and accessible applications for drought planning and management. In 2020, the Pacific Islands CASC funded an effort to add an additional 10 partner sites, including Department of Interior management units, state entities, and Native Hawaiian land management units, to expand the coverage of Drought Knowledge Exchange-informed management in Hawai‘i. 

Learning from Recent Snow Droughts to Improve Forecasting of Water Availability for People and Forests

Issue: Although snowmelt is a crucial water source for many regions, water scarcity from a lack of snow, or “snow droughts,” are poorly understood.  

CASC Science: This project, funded by the Southwest CASC, quantified the impact of snow droughts on municipal and ecosystem water supplies. Through this research, the authors have identified two distinct types of snow droughts: “dry snow drought,” caused by a lack of winter precipitation needed to accumulate snow, and “warm snow drought,” caused by early snowmelt or by precipitation falling as rain rather than snow.  

Applications: These insights are being used to model seasonal streamflow across the Southwest to aid resource management decisions.  

Product Highlights 

Drought Index Portal 

Researchers at the North Central CASC partnered with Earth Lab to create the Drought Index Portal (DrIP), a premier online tool for comparing different metrics of droughts across time and space. This web analytic tool allows users to display and extract time series data for different drought indices across the continental United States. 

Droughts and Hurricanes in the U.S. Caribbean Oral History Series

Stories of ecological drought and other extreme weather events which impact the U.S. Caribbean are best told by the people who call these islands home and experienced them firsthand. In 2018, the Southeast CASC recorded the oral histories of resource managers from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands about their experiences with extreme weather events, as part of a U.S. Caribbean drought workshop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. These individual stories — in their own native voices from U.S. Caribbean communities — give us access to a collection of experiences with the potential to help communities and researchers adapt to a changing climate. 

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