Article
Agreement and Uncertainty Among Climate Change Impact Models: A Synthesis of Sagebrush Steppe Vegetation Projections
Rangeland Ecology & Management
(2021)
Abstract
Ecologists have built numerous models to project how climate change will impact rangeland vegetation, but these projections of future changes are difficult to validate, making their utility for land management planning unclear. In the absence of direct validation, researchers can ask whether projections from different models are consistent. High consistency across models, especially those based on different assumptions, would increase confidence in using projections for planning. Here, we analyzed 19 models of climate change impacts on sagebrush, cheatgrass, pinyon-juniper, and forage production on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the US Intermountain West. These models consistently projected the potential for pinyon-juniper declines and forage production increases. In contrast, models of cheatgrass mainly projected no climate change impacts, while sagebrush models projected no change in most areas and declines in southern extremes. In most instances, vegetation projections from high- and low-emission scenarios differed only slightly.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2021
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2020.12.006
Citation Information
Peter B. Adler. "Agreement and Uncertainty Among Climate Change Impact Models: A Synthesis of Sagebrush Steppe Vegetation Projections" Rangeland Ecology & Management Vol. 75 (2021) p. 119 - 129 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/peter_adler/278/