Wildlife and Plants

Marine and inland fisheries provide substantial economic, nutritional, recreational, and cultural benefits to human populations globally. Though extensive research and management efforts exist to ensure the sustainability of these important resources, many fisheries still face threats including climate change, habitat degradation, and overfishing. The inland fisheries community often...

Forests play a role in air quality by supplying the atmosphere with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), precursors to ozone and aerosols. Different tree types emit different VOCs, each with different capacity to form ozone and aerosols. Therefore, shifts in forest composition may impact ozone and aerosol yields. Climate change is one of the expected drivers of forest change. In particular...

Water temperatures are warming in lakes and streams, resulting in the loss of many native fish. Given clear passage, coldwater stream fishes can take refuge upstream when larger streams become too warm. Likewise, many Midwestern lakes “thermally stratify” resulting in warmer waters on top of deeper, cooler waters. Many of these lakes are connected to threatened streams. To date...

This project was designed to use the combined strengths of the cooperators to address their concerns stemming from the degradation of arid environments in the Great Basin. The project aimed to identify the regional ecological and social costs and benefits of both immediate hydrologic modifications (low-profile constructed dams) and longer-term restoration of beavers (Castor canadensis)...

Migratory birds may be hit especially hard by climate change – particularly waterbirds that depend on wetlands as resting and feeding sites during their journey between breeding and non-breeding grounds. California’s Central Valley and the interior basins of southeastern Oregon and northeastern California provide some of the most critical wetlands resources to migratory waterbirds in the...

In the western U.S., rising temperatures and pronounced drought conditions pose significant challenges to public land managers. Widespread declines of multiple plant species have already been observed, providing insight into what the future could look like for vegetation in the region as conditions are projected to become warmer and drier. To understand how vulnerable western ecosystems...

In 2017, California was experiencing its most severe drought in over a millennia. Low rainfall and record high temperatures resulted in increased tree mortality and complete forest diebacks across the West. Though land managers scrambled to respond, they lacked information needed to make informed decisions. Focusing on California’s central and southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, this...

Climate change poses a variety of threats to biodiversity. Most efforts to assess the likely impacts of climate change on biodiversity try to rank species based on their vulnerability under changed environmental conditions. These efforts have generally not considered the ability of organisms to adjust their phenotype to the changing environment. Organisms can do this by one of two ways...

Climate and land use change will strongly affect tropical island ecosystems and trust species (like migratory birds and threatened and endangered species). The risks of significant negative impacts are likely to be higher in these island systems than in many temperate regions of the world because of the limited size of their land masses, high numbers of species that only exist in...

Maple syrup is produced from the sap of sugar maple trees collected in the late winter and early spring. Native American tribes have collected and boiled down sap for centuries, and the tapping of maple trees is a cultural touchstone for many people in the Northeast and Midwest. Overall demand for maple syrup has been rapidly rising as more people appreciate this natural sweetener. Yet...

On Hawai‘i’s mountains, cloud droplets, propelled by strong winds, are deposited on plants, where they accumulate and drip to the ground, adding water over and above that supplied by rainfall. Prior studies show that the amount of intercepted cloud water is substantial, and variable from place to place. Estimates of the spatial patterns of cloud water interception (CWI), the fog-related...