| | Accession Number | 5003862 |
| | Title | Integrating the effects of land use and global climate change on hydrology and |
| | vegetation of Northern Great Plains wetlands |
| | Project Description | A comprehensive assessment of the effects of global climate change on prairie wetland |
| | landscapes is proposed. A new wetland model, WETSCAPE, will be used to evaluate the |
| | vulnerability of the range of wetland types to changes in temperature and precipitation predicted by |
| | global climate change models. Significant ecological effects could result because prairie wetlands |
| | provide the single most important breeding area for waterfowl in North America and play a major |
| | role in regional hydrology, land use, and economics. This proposal will determine the causal |
| | mechanisms underlying wetland response to global change by focusing on the wetland hydrologic |
| | regime. WETSCAPE will incorporate both surface water and ground water dynamics. The effects |
| | of surrounding land use will be incorporated into the model and allow for the development and |
| | testing of changing land use and conservation practices as a means to mitigate global climate |
| | change predictions. We will also modify WETSCAPE so we can extend the results of local scale |
| | simulations to the landscape/regional scale and provide a region wide assessment of the |
| | integrated effects of global climate change and land use practices. The advantage of applying |
| | spatial models to simulate the response of wetland landscapes to global climate change |
| | scenarios is that ecological and environmental processes occurring at local scales and influenced |
| | by landscape heterogeneity can be extended over landscape and regional scales and be more |
| | realistically predicted. |
| | Keywords | climate change, hydrology, land-use, landscape, waterfowl, wetland, |
| | Principal | Dr. G R, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center: glenn_guntenspergen@usgs.gov; |
| | Investigators |
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