ABSTRACT
Downscaled Climate Scenarios ................................................................ 536 22.7 Summary ..................................................................................................... 539 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. 539 References .............................................................................................................540
Assessing the impacts of climate change on protected areas such as national parks is crucial for decision makers to develop adaptive management strategies to help protect natural resources for the bene‰t of the society. The National Park Service (NPS) recently developed a Climate Change Response Strategy (CCRS) featuring four integrated components: science, adaptation, mitigation, and communication (NPS, 2010). Scientists can contribute to this strategy by providing data and information about projected climate change impacts on ecosystems within and surrounding national parks and other protected areas. As outlined in the NPS CCRS, climate change can affect parks and protected areas in a number of ways. Changes in temperature and precipitation are leading to reductions in winter snow pack and shifts in the timing and amount of stream˜ow (Stewart et al., 2005). These changes, in turn, can lead to shifts in the distribution of species (e.g., Moritz et al., 2008) and alterations to the ‰re cycle, including increasing frequency of wild‰res (Westerling et al., 2006). In addition, warmer temperatures are leading to conditions which are favorable to outbreaks of insects and pathogens (Bentz et al., 2010) which are impacting on forested ecosystems throughout the United States, and increasing tree mortality rates have been reported for forests in the western United States (van Mantgem et al., 2009). As impacts from climate change to species and ecosystems begin to emerge, there is an increasing need to develop a standard approach to produce long-term forecasts of key ecological parameters at spatial scales that are relevant to park managers.
