The Interactions of Climate Change, Land Management Policies and Forest
Succession on Fire Hazard and Ecosystem Trajectories in the Wildland-Urban Interface
Funded by the National Science Foundation Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program
Principal Investigators: Bart Johnson1, Scott Bridgham1, David Hulse1, Robert Ribe1, John Bolte2, Ronald Nielson3, Alan Ager3, Constance Harrington3, Jane Kertis3, and James Lenihan3
Postdoctoral Associate: Peter Gould3
Ph.D. Student: Gabriel Yospin1
1University of Oregon, 2Oregon State University, 3USDA Forest Service
Projecting the future effects of climate change on coupled natural/human systems at local extents has become increasingly important in a wide array of land use planning and policy contexts. The goal of this proposal is to identify policies that reduce wildfire hazard and the loss of imperiled ecosystems by exploring the coupled effects of climatic and land use changes in western Oregon’s rapidly changing Willamette Valley Ecoregion (WVE). We will investigate human/natural systems by linking models of how climate change affects forest succession and wildfire in historic savanna and prairie ecosystems with an agent-based model of human land use and land management decisions. We contrast conventional predict-then-act approaches with our explore-then-test approach in which we build a transferable analysis platform that allows us to: a) explore large numbers of alternative future landscapes; b) seek robust rather than optimal alternatives for reducing risk of wildfire and biodiversity loss given the uncertainties of local climate change effects; and c) identify land management policies that facilitate such robustness.
We employ an approach that downscales from the coarse scales of Atmospheric-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) and Dynamic Global Vegetation Models to the fine scales at which human land use and management decisions are made, and then scales back up to represent the landscape-scale effects of human actions on vegetation and fire hazard. Through the use of an agent-based model, individual decision makers respond to a suite of factors including climate, land use regulation and incentives, land markets, fire hazard, land management costs and aesthetics. Agent behaviors will be parameterized probabilistically based on a survey of study area landowners as well as census and other local data.
We will test three hypotheses: 1) climate change will lead to altered fuel loads and greater wildfire hazard in the WVE; 2) current WVE land use trajectories will lead to increased wildland-urban interface area and changes in vegetation that together increase the risk of wildfire and loss of imperiled ecosystems; and 3) some policy sets will be more robust than others in managing fire risk and sustaining imperiled ecosystems across a range of future climate scenarios.
Within this framework we will test a range of plausible future scenarios that vary across three dimensions: 1) different combinations of AOGCMs and emissions scenarios, 2) different land use scenarios that accommodate projected increases in human populations, and 3) different land management scenarios in which landowners are encouraged to reduce fire hazard and conserve or restore imperiled prairie and oak ecosystems through a variety of accepted policy mechanisms.
Our research supports emerging national, regional and local initiatives by providing tools for responding to climate change. Global climate change models have become increasingly mechanistic, sophisticated and spatially explicit. However, the development of mechanistic models of how coupled biological and human cultural systems will respond to climate change at the spatial scales at which land management decisions are made is in its infancy. This research will produce a transferable methodology for modeling such systems that is tractable, spatially explicit, and directly linked to policy-based decision-making. Our investigations will advance knowledge of how to bridge key theoretical and practical issues related to multiple types of system uncertainties, different spatial and temporal scales, and complex interactions and feedbacks among coupled natural and human systems. Further, the specific context and issues addressed in our project represent widespread and pressing societal problems.
The risk of catastrophic wildfire in the wildland-urban interface is a growing nationwide threat that projected climate change is likely to exacerbate. The loss of biodiversity due to urbanization is also the subject of intensive inquiry and increasing concern. Our approach links these two issues by examining the potential to conserve biodiversity by providing key ecosystem services, in this case, restoring imperiled grasslands as a way to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. The development of solutions that are robust to future uncertainties is an important and emerging approach toward adaptively managing complex systems that include strongly coupled ecological and socio-economic processes.
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Poster describing this project, including selected results from our former project on successional trajectories of oak savanna and prairie CHN Poster