Has prescribed fire removed enough small trees so that remaining trees have sufficient moisture to survive the extended drought? The answer to this question has profound implications for forest management over the coming decades as drought stress on our forests is expected to increase rapidly.

The severe drought extending from 2012 to 2015 across much of California provides a remarkable natural experiment to test whether prescribed fire creates conditions where forests are resistant to drought.

This project will conduct a vulnerability assessment, develop climate‐smart adaptation strategies and actions, and generate implementation plans for focal habitats of the South and Central Coast regions of the CALCC, with a specific focus on four Southern California National Forests (Angeles, San Bernardino, Cleveland, Los Padres). This effort will provide information and tools for USFS planning and management (e.g., NEPA analyses, Forest Plan Revisions, Climate Change Performance Scorecard – “Scorecard”) and other natural

Resource managers realize the immediate threats of climate change to the resilience, health, and ecosystem services of the special coastal and ocean places they protect, yet the resources to develop appropriate management options to prepare for and respond to a changing environment are limited.

This project will synthesize available science on redwood climate resilience strategies at a workshop and related field trip involving the National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, private landowners, scientists and non-governmental organizations. The resultant comprehensive strategies will help managers prepare coast redwoods for climate change and land-use stressors. 

The Pacific Flyway Shorebird Survey is a coordinated multi-partner research and monitoring program led by Point Blue Conservation Science designed to guide the management and conservation of wintering shorebirds in the Pacific Flyway, a migration corridor stretching from Alaska to Chile. The first phase of the effort has focused on California's Central Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, and the coastal regions of California and northern Baja California, Mexico. These regions provide critical habitat for large populations of migrating and wintering shorebirds in the Pacific Flyway.

This project designs a monitoring program and protocol to detect the effects of climate change on tidal marsh bird population abundance and distribution. It is a companion to the project “Tidal Marsh Bird Population and Habitat Assessment for San Francisco Bay under Future Climate Change Conditions” and will build on its products, enabling evaluation of the long-term viability of four tidal-marsh bird species threatened by impacts of climate change: Clapper Rail, Black Rail, Common Yellowthroat, and Song Sparrow.

This project analyzes downscaled climate model data to assess the geography of climate change at scales relevant to actual conservation actions. This work analyzes the California Essential Habitat Connectivity products to determine which protected lands are most vulnerable and which of the proposed corridors would partially mitigate climate change threats.

This project uses species distribution modeling to assess the risk to habitat change under climate change scenarios for rare plants. The project models the current distribution of the species, uses these models to predict the species distribution given climate change, calculates current and future range size, calculates the amount of overlap of predicted future distribution with current distribution, and assesses where barriers and protected areas are located with reference to the change in species distribution.

This project researched the expected variation in avian demographic responses to environmental change across a gradient of species and landscapes from the San Francisco Bay to the Central Valley of California. Project partners used two avian taxa, waterfowl and songbirds, as case studies for the integration of long-term demographic data with climate change variables.

This project uses modeling at a parcel scale to measure the effects of sea-level rise on coastal ecosystems and tidal salt marshes. The project team will measure several parameters that will be incorporated into ArcGIS models creating comparable datasets across the Pacific coast tidal gradient. The ultimate goal is to provide science support tools for local adaptation planning from the bottom-up that may be implemented under a structured decision-making framework.