CAREER: Citizens, Conservation, and Climate: Research and Education for Climate Literacy in Managed Landscapes

Public lands provide important ecosystem services such provisioning and regulation of water resources, climate regulation, and cultural and spiritual inspiration. Climate change impacts the sustainability of these ecosystem services and with the extensive public lands across the western U.S., a management response to these impacts is necessary. Land management activities (e.g., fire, grazing, selective tree thinning) influence ecosystem services by directly impacting the structure and composition of terrestrial vegetation and indirectly modifying water, energy, and nutrient cycling. Changes to surface moisture and energy balance induce corresponding changes in the regional hydroclimate. Quantitative understanding of these feedbacks and how they propagate to ecosystem services like the provisioning of water is lacking. This project will improve fundamental understanding of how land management practices influence regional hydroclimate while facilitating improved modeling of coupled hydroclimate-human systems. Specifically, existing models will be used to develop an experimental framework that explicitly simulates: (1) the autonomous behavior of land management agencies in response to perceptions of climate change, and (2) how regional climate and hydrology respond to landscape disturbance associated with these management activities. Information exchange between models will occur in the form of changes to the organization and structure of landscape vegetation as a result of management activities. This modeling framework will be used to understand how management activities and climate change jointly replumb the hydrologic system as the global climate changes. The project focuses on quantifying changes in key variables like precipitation, snow storage, soil moisture, and streamflow in a large water supply basin in southwest Idaho, USA. This project will also improve climate literacy in Idaho k-12 education. The research team will develop a pilot program to train and equip educators to engage their students in the fabrication, use, and exploration of miniaturized automated weather stations. Linking the program to Common Core standards, participating k-12 teachers will be conferred professional development credits by taking part in the training program and engaged as ambassadors for the program. Travel expenses for several teachers of underserved populations will be supported by the project.

This project will investigate how land management decisions (e.g., forest thinning, prescribed fire) will modify the ecological and hydrological health of public lands in a changing climate. In particular, we will determine how changes in vegetation associated with these and other management activities impact regional precipitation and water supply. We will accomplish this by linking simulation tools that incorporate human activities and decision-making with physical processes to create scenarios of the future. These scenarios will help land managers adapt their practices to a changing climate to better protect water resources. This project will also develop a program to help k-12 teachers educate students about climate. This program will provide the training and materials to enable students to create meteorological stations to monitor climate and bring those observations into the classroom. Overall, this project will influence conservation of public lands, which comprise approximately 50% of western states and provide critically important natural resources, and promote improved climate literacy, increasing our capacity to adapt to a changing climate.