Connecting Alaska landscapes into the future

Alaska marmots, trumpeter swans, reed canary grass, caribou, and entire biomes such as the Arctic and the Aleutians were featured in a presentation addressing the future of Alaska’s landscapes Dec. 8.

Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning Coordinator Nancy Fresco and Karen Murphy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service talked about their research in a collaborative project involving many state and federal agencies and other nongovernmental partners. Project leaders also include Falk Huettman, UAF, and John Morton, USFWS. Goals were to identify areas in Alaska that likely serve as landscape-level migration corridors currently and into the future given climate change, and to identify strategies that will help maintain landscape-level connectivity by focusing conservation efforts, minimizing redundant research and monitoring, and sharing data and information.

For this project, SNAP provided climate projections representing precipitation and temperature for June and December for selected decades from the 2000s to the 2090s. Dr. Huettman created models that linked current species and biome distributions to recent climate conditions, and then used SNAP projections to map potential shifts in biomes and species ranges. Fresco stressed that these maps represent only potential change, and that the plant species that characterize these biomes would be unlikely to move so rapidly. “Still, there are likely to be some fairly radical shifts,” Fresco said. The most noticeable differences predicted include movement of Interior climate north into much of what is currently Arctic, and potential biome instability in the western part of the state. The maps also show resiliency--places in the state where changes are most and least likely to occur.

Recommendations included in the report include focusing on better modeling, delineation, and monitoring of both refugia and regions of extreme change. Further work will focus on adding species distributions and populations to the analysis. Each species’ ability to migrate and tolerate temperature may be charted. Adding permafrost and sea ice data will make the maps “a sharper tool,” Murphy said.

The map predictions show the Trumpeter swan population spreading northward and westward in coming decades, reed canary grass (an invasive species) spreading widely across the state, and Alaska marmots thinning and shifting northward. Caribou, a generalist species, proved difficult to model using the above techniques.

These results will be presented in a report that will be approved by the various partners before being officially released. Project participants hope that the report will serve as a jumping-off point for future research as well as an aid to all Alaskans with a stake in landscape management. A podcast of the presentation and the slide show are available at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy website. ACCAP hosted the webinar.