Managing uncertainty in climate-driven ecological models to inform adaptation to climate change

Abstract

Abstract. The impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems are likely to require changes in forest planning and natural resource management. Changes in tree growth, disturbance extent and intensity, and eventually species distributions are expected. In natural resource management and planning, ecosystem models are typically used to provide a ''best estimate'' about how forests might work in the future and thus guide decision-making. Ecosystem models can be used to develop forest management strategies that anticipate these changes, but limited experience with models and model output is a challenge for managers in thinking about how to address potential effects of climate change. What do decision makers need to know about climate models, ecological models used for impacts assessments, and the uncertainty in model projections in order to use model output in strategies for adaptation to climate change? We present approaches for understanding and reducing the uncertainty associated with modeling the effects of climate change on ecosystems, focusing on multi-model approaches to clarify the strengths and limits of projections and minimize vulnerability to undesirable consequences of climate change. Scientific uncertainties about changes in climate or projections of their impacts on resources do not present fundamental barriers to management and adaptation to climate change. Instead, many of these uncertainties can be controlled by characterizing their effects on models and future projections from those models. There is uncertainty in decision making that does not derive just from the complex interaction of climate and ecosystem models, but in how modeling is integrated with other aspects of the decision environment such as choice of objectives, monitoring, and approach to assessment. Adaptive management provides a hedge against uncertainty, such that climate and ecosystem models can inform decision making.

Farmers' responses to climate change impact on water availability: insights from the Indrawati Basin in Nepal

“…There is a consensus that climate change will bring about long-term adverse impacts not only on water resources (IPCC, 2007) but also on agriculture (Nelson et al, 2009), ecosystems (Littell, McKenzie, Kerns, Cushman, & Shaw, 2011), and human and environmental health (Patz, Campbell-Lendrum, Holloway, & Foley, 2005;Malik, Awan, & Khan, 2012). The effect on water availability is likely to be profound and will affect agricultural production (IPCC, 2007;Parry, Rosenzweig, Iglesias, Livermore, & Fischer, 2004).…”

A Climate-Oriented Approach to Support Decision-Making for Seed Provenance in Ecological Restoration

“…These include data cleaning for elimination of spurious and misidentified records, selection of non-correlated predictors and analysis of their fitted response functions, consideration of the sampling bias, and use of sensitivity analyses to evaluate the impact of model calibration decisions (Elith and Leathwick, 2009). However, other sources of uncertainty, such as the inherent uncertainty of climate change projections, are irreducible, but can be explicitly dealt with using established methods (Littell et al, 2011). For example, Snover et al (2013) provide a structured approach and general guidelines for selecting climate-change scenarios for ecological impact assessment and conservation decision making, which can be applied to provenance selection.…”

“…Genetic risks also need to be evaluated through a genetic risk framework (Byrne et al, 2011), and taken into account in this decision-making process. Ensemble analysis is another example of an approach to deal with uncertainty in climate projections, and which characterizes and maps the consensus across different global climate models (Littell et al, 2011). Finally, Lee-Yaw et al (2016) also suggest combining SDMs and reciprocal transplantation experiments to iteratively reduce the uncertainty on both approaches.…”

Smoke consequences of new wildfire regimes driven by climate change

“…For example, the "tried-and-true" SRES pathways have seen much use not only in climate modeling but also for ecosystem models of many kinds [Littell et al, 2011]. In contrast, the RCPs are expected to be the paradigm for the future, but have a much shorter history, although experiments are now underway [Taylor et al, 2012].…”