Jessica R. Haas

Exposure of U.S. National Parks to land use and climate change 1900–2100

Many protected areas may not be adequately safeguarding biodiversity from human activities on surrounding lands and global change. The magnitude of such change agents and the sensitivity of ecosystems to these agents vary among protected areas. Thus, there is a need to assess vulnerability across networks of protected areas to determine those most at risk and to lay the basis for developing effective adaptation strategies. We conducted an assessment of exposure of U.S. National Parks to climate and land use change and consequences for vegetation communities. We first defined park protected-area centered ecosystems (PACEs) based on ecological principles. We then drew on existing land use, invasive species, climate, and biome data sets and models to quantify exposure of PACEs from 1900 through 2100. Most PACEs experienced substantial change over the 20th century (> 740% average increase in housing density since 1940, 13% of vascular plants are presently nonnative, temperature increase of 1 degree C/100 yr since 1895 in 80% of PACEs), and projections suggest that many of these trends will continue at similar or increasingly greater rates (255% increase in housing density by 2100, temperature increase of 2.5 degrees-4.5 degrees C/100 yr, 30% of PACE areas may lose their current biomes by 2030). In the coming century, housing densities are projected to increase in PACEs at about 82% of the rate of since 1940. The rate of climate warming in the coming century is projected to be 2.5-5.8 times higher than that measured in the past century. Underlying these averages, exposure of individual park PACEs to change agents differ in important ways. For example, parks such as Great Smoky Mountains exhibit high land use and low climate exposure, others such as Great Sand Dunes exhibit low land use and high climate exposure, and a few such as Point Reyes exhibit high exposure on both axes. The cumulative and synergistic effects of such changes in land use, invasives, and climate are expected to dramatically impact ecosystem function and biodiversity in national parks. These results are foundational to developing effective adaptation strategies and suggest policies to better safeguard parks under broad-scale environmental change.

Development and application of a geospatial wildfire exposure and risk calculation tool

Applying wildfire risk assessment models can inform investments in loss mitigation and landscape restoration, and can be used to monitor spatiotemporal trends in risk. Assessing wildfire risk entails the integration of fire modeling outputs, maps of highly valued resources and assets (HVRAs), characterization of fire effects, and articulation of relative importance across HVRAs. Quantifying and geo-processing wildfire risk can be a complex and time-intensive task, often requiring expertise in geospatial analysis. Researchers and land managers alike would benefit from a standardized and streamlined ability to estimate wildfire risk. In this paper we present the development and application of a geospatial wildfire risk calculation tool, FireNVC. We describe the major components of the tool and how they align with a geospatial wildfire risk assessment framework, detail a recent application of the tool to inform federal wildfire management and planning, and offer suggestions for future improvements and uses of the tool. We review the development of FireNVC, a geospatial wildfire risk calculation tool.FireNVC is a flexible platform to assess risk to multiple resources and assets.FireNVC enables a streamlined process for quantifying risks at landscape scales.We apply the tool to help prioritize risk mitigation planning on federal land.Sensitivity analysis suggests results are robust for prioritization.

Wildfire Risk Transmission in the Colorado Front Range, USA

Wildfires are a global phenomenon that in some circumstances can result in human casualties, economic loss, and ecosystem service degradation. In this article we spatially identify wildfire risk transmission pathways and locate the areas of highest exposure of human populations to wildland fires under severe, but not uncommon, weather events. We quantify varying levels of exposure in terms of population potentially affected and tie the exposure back to the spatial source of the risk for the Front Range of Colorado, USA. We use probabilistic fire simulation modeling to address where fire ignitions are most likely to cause the highest impact to human communities, and to explore the role that various landowners play in that transmission of risk. Our results indicated that, given an ignition and the right fire weather conditions, large areas along the Front Range in Colorado could be exposed to wildfires with high potential to impact human populations, and that overall private ignitions have the potential to impact more people than federal ignitions. These results can be used to identify high-priority areas for wildfire risk mitigation using various mitigation tools.