Climate Change/Land Use Change Scenarios for Habitat Threat Assessments on California Rangelands

Phase 1 (2011): Integrating Science into Decisions: Climate Change/Land Use Change Scenarios and Outreach for Habitat Threat Assessments on California Rangelands
This project will aid conservation of California rangelands by identifying future integrated threats of climate change and land use change, and will quantify two main co-benefits of rangeland conservation - water supply and carbon sequestration. Through a multi-stakeholder partnership, the project proponents will develop integrated climate change/land use change scenarios for the Central Valley and Chaparral and Oak Woodland eco-regions, and disseminate information about future potential threats to high priority conservation areas within the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition (CRCC) study area, which includes the foothills around the Central Valley and most of the southern Inner Coast Range.

Phase 2 (2012): Integrated Scenarios and Outreach for Habitat Threat Assessments on California Rangelands: Metrics and Economic Analysis for Decision Support
In year two of this work, the project team will calculate metrics at the landscape and watershed scale for the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition (CRCC) focus area and will quantify fragmentation of grazing land; change in bioclimatic distribution of oaks, grassland and shrubland; change in wildlife habitat; change in runoff, recharge and stream discharge; and change in carbon stocks and flux. The project team will develop an on-line tool that will include maps of important areas where changes in water availability and wildlife habitat coincide. Economic analysis of scenarios will be applied to quantify costs and benefits to the CRCC landscape. Comparison of analyses across scenarios will allow resource managers to identify potential risks and opportunities - both biological and economical - for rangeland across alternative futures.

Science Delivery Phase (2013): Integrated Scenarios and Outreach for Assessing Threats to Ecosystem Services on California Rangelands: Science Delivery
Resource Conservation Districts (RCD's) staff will be recipients of training on project results and the web-based data visualization tool so that science products can be applied in local decision-making. Trainings will be accompanied by a peer-reviewed USGS Fact Sheet and additional online content. Focus will be on the RCDs located in the 6 case-study watersheds, there will be 3 trainings that summarize findings from the project and provide instruction on the use of the online tool. A project presentation and demonstration of the online tool will also be provided at the 2013 California Association of RCDs Annual Conference.

There is a website with project results and interactive maps at http://climate.calcommons.org/aux/rangeland/index.html

The raster geospatial data from this project is available at: http://data.prbo.org/RangelandRasterData_Geotiff/

Vector geospatial data is available at the links below.