Woods Hole Research Center

Field Notes

Landscape Climate Change Vulnerability Project - Asheville, NC

In November 2012, staff from WHRC attended meetings and made field site visits in the Great Smoky Mountains as part of a project called the Landscape Climate Change Vulnerability Project (LCC-VP). In addition to WHRC, the LCC-VP team is composed of collaborators from universities, government agencies, and other non-profit organizations.

Our motivation stems from scientific projections that, over the coming century, changes in climate may exceed the resilience of ecosystems and lead to major disruptions of habitats and species. At the same time, human land use intensification is likely to constrain both the movements of organisms and the adaptation strategies of natural resource managers. In anticipation of these changes, our goal is to produce analyses that inform managers of the vulnerability of ecological systems (e.g., forest types) within their management areas under various climate and land use change scenarios.

As a diverse team with expertise in several research areas, the project is multi-faceted and will put many useful and interesting data products into the hands of resource managers. At WHRC, our piece of the project involves modeling habitat suitability for a number of key tree species and forecasting suitable habitat space for those species into the future under different scenarios. We are primarily concerned with species that occur along the Appalachian mountain range and will focus on four National Parks: the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

In support of this effort, we visited the Great Smokies to get an on-the-ground view (as opposed to our typical view from a satellite image) of the types of systems we are attempting to model. We had very productive meetings with members of the National Park Service, who informed us of their management needs at the parks and the types of products that would be most useful in their decision-making processes. These products included: predicted monthly climate data through the year 2100 (precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature), maps of habitat connectivity (i.e. migration corridors), species-level maps of vulnerability (i.e. how sensitive is the species to change? Can it adapt?), and maps of current and future habitat suitability.

Our “conference room” was a beautiful mountaintop clearing near Clingmans Dome in which we discussed opportunities for research and collaboration. We hiked back along the Appalachian Trail, which was still a bit treacherous after the three feet of snow the park received during Hurricane Sandy a few weeks ago. As we hiked along, we pondered what this breathtakingly beautiful landscape might look like in the years to come: Which plants and animals will be able to adapt to the predicted increase in frequency and intensity of storms, like Hurricane Sandy? With changing temperatures and precipitation patterns, will new species move in? Will the current species have to migrate elsewhere to find suitable conditions? With an eye toward management for current and future climatic conditions, these are the exact types of questions we hope to answer with this project.

Tina Cormier, Research Assistant