Tamara Wilson
Biography
Tamara’s broad research interests include how land use and land cover change, both historic and projected, influence regional environmental processes while identifying the local and non-local drivers of land use change. Her graduate training at the University of Arizona was in the fields of biogeography, climatology, climate change, paleoclimate, and paleoecology. With her experience examining the connections between biogeographic history and past climate, she was able to make the leap to utilizing modern archives of change derived from satellites to examine climate and human-derived landscape level changes and impacts. She was a co-editor of the USGS Professional Paper titled Status and Trends of Land Use and Land Cover in the Western United States –an unprecedented report documenting nearly three decades of land use and land cover change using the Landsat imagery archive. The report is a culmination of over 10 years of collective work with dozens of colleagues and across multiple science centers. Her recent work with the U.S. Geological Survey’s LandCarbon project helped to produce the first set of land use and land cover projections out to the year 2100 for the conterminous United States based on four different IPCC scenarios.
Tamara has expanded her land change scenarios work in California to estimate future land-use related water demand under various land use futures. This work has grown to include funding from California's Strategic Growth Council for examining future water demand in groundwater dependent regions along California's Central Coast. Tamara has recently modeled future flooded agricultural lands in the Central Valley as part of the NASA Ecoforecasting project.
As recently appointed Deputy Director of the National Innovation Center, Tamara is working to expand the reach of the center, develop communications pipelines and workshops on the latest technology and its use in the federal science portfolio.
Science and Products
Pacific Region Colloquium
The Pacific Region Colloquium, founded in February 1996 as the Western Region Colloquium, was a monthly speaker series that spanned the spectrum of earth and environmental science.
Land use and tsunami hazards in the Pacific Northwest
Tsunamis have the potential to cause considerable damage to communities along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coastline. As coastal communities expand over time, the potential societal impact of tsunami inundation changes.
To understand how community exposure to tsunami hazards may change in coming decades, we projected future development (i.e. urban, residential, and rural), households, and...
California land-change projections
This dataset consists of modeled projections of land use and land cover and population for the State of California for the period 1970-2101. For the 1970-2001 period, we used the USGS's LUCAS model to "backcast" LULC, beginning with the 2001 initial conditions and ending with 1970. For future projections, the model was initialized in 2001 and run forward on an annual time step to 2100. In...
Threats to protected areas
Land-use intensification poses significant threats to biodiversity both directly through the alteration and fragmentation of ecosystems and habitat loss, and indirectly through the disruption of supporting ecological processes. While protected areas offer refugia for species and ecosystems, they do not function in isolation from surrounding natural, working, or human-dominated landscapes....
Land change and water use in Mediterranean California
Water shortages in California are a growing concern amidst ongoing drought, earlier spring snowmelt, projected future climate warming, and currently mandated water-use restrictions. Increases in population and land use in coming decades will place additional pressure on already limited available water supplies.
We used a state-and-transition simulation model to project future changes in...
Land Use and Climate Change Team
We are a research team focusing on understanding the rates, causes, and consequences of land change across a range of geographic and temporal scales. Our emphasis is on developing alternative future projections and quantifying the impact on environmental systems, in particular, the role of land-use change on ecosystem carbon dynamics.
We are interested in how land-use and climate...
Effects of 21st century climate, land use, and disturbances on ecosystem carbon balance in California
Terrestrial ecosystems are an important sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), sequestering ~30% of annual anthropogenic emissions and slowing the rise of atmospheric CO2. However, the future direction and magnitude of the land sink is highly uncertain. We examined how historical and projected changes in climate, land use, and ecosystem...
Sleeter, Benjamin M.; David Marvin; D. Richard Cameron; Selmants, Paul; LeRoy Westerling; Kreitler, Jason R.; Colin Daniel; Liu, Jinxun; Wilson, Tamara Future scenarios of land change based on empirical data and demographic trends
Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) have important and fundamental interactions with the global climate system. Top-down global scale projections of land use change have been an important component of climate change research; however, their utility at local to regional scales is often limited. The goal of this study was to develop an...
Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Wilson, Tamara; Sharygin, Ethan; Sherba, Jason T. Mediterranean California’s water use future under multiple scenarios of developed and agricultural land use change
With growing demand and highly variable inter-annual water supplies, California’s water use future is fraught with uncertainty. Climate change projections, anticipated population growth, and continued agricultural intensification, will likely stress existing water supplies in coming decades. Using a state-and-transition simulation modeling...
Wilson, Tamara; Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Cameron, D. Richard Projecting community changes in hazard exposure to support long-term risk reduction: A case study of tsunami hazards in the U.S. Pacific Northwest
Tsunamis have the potential to cause considerable damage to communities along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coastline. As coastal communities expand over time, the potential societal impact of tsunami inundation changes. To understand how community exposure to tsunami hazards may change in coming decades, we projected future development (i.e. urban,...
Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Wood, Nathan J.; Soulard, Christopher E.; Wilson, Tamara Estimating carbon sequestration in the piedmont ecoregion of the United States from 1971 to 2010
Background: Human activities have diverse and profound impacts on ecosystem carbon cycles. The Piedmont ecoregion in the eastern United States has undergone significant land use and land cover change in the past few decades. The purpose of this study was to use newly available land use and land cover change data to quantify carbon changes within...
Liu, Jinxun; Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Zhu, Zhiliang; Heath, Linda S.; Tan, Zhengxi; Wilson, Tamara; Sherba, Jason T.; Zhou, Decheng Future land-use related water demand in California
Water shortages in California are a growing concern amidst ongoing drought, earlier spring snowmelt, projected future climate warming, and currently mandated water use restrictions. Increases in population and land use in coming decades will place additional pressure on already limited available water supplies. We used a state-and-transition...
Wilson, Tamara; Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Cameron, D. Richard Land-use impacts on water resources and protected areas: applications of state-and-transition simulation modeling of future scenarios
Human land use will increasingly contribute to habitat loss and water shortages in California, given future population projections and associated land-use demand. Understanding how land-use change may impact future water use and where existing protected areas may be threatened by land-use conversion will be important if effective, sustainable...
Wilson, Tamara; Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Sherba, Jason T.; Dick Cameron Spatially explicit modeling of 1992-2100 land cover and forest stand age for the conterminous United States
Information on future land-use and land-cover (LULC) change is needed to analyze the impact of LULC change on ecological processes. The U.S. Geological Survey has produced spatially explicit, thematically detailed LULC projections for the conterminous United States. Four qualitative and quantitative scenarios of LULC change were developed, with...
Sohl, Terry L.; Sayler, Kristi L.; Bouchard, Michelle; Reker, Ryan R.; Friesz, Aaron M.; Bennett, Stacie L.; Sleeter, Benjamin M.; Sleeter, Rachel R.; Wilson, Tamara; Soulard, Christopher E.; Knuppe, Michelle; Van Hofwegen, Travis