Strategic Approaches for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment across the National Park System
Project ID: P15AC01248
Federal Agency: National Park Service
Partner Institution: University of Washington
Fiscal Year: 2015
Initial Funding: $80,000
Total Funding: $214,918
Project Type: Technical Assistance
Project Disciplines: Interdisciplinary
National Park: Pacific West Region
Principal Investigator: Lawler, Joshua
Agreement Technical Representative: Wood, Melanie
Abstract: The NPS Climate Change Action Plan (2012-2014) recognized the need for a plan to cover climate change vulnerability information gaps by identifying the development of a climate change vulnerability assessment framework as a priority action. In 2013-2014, National Park staff, led by NPS Climate Change Scientist Patrick Gonzalez, developed a draft framework that set forth elements of a plan for consistent and comprehensive assessment of vulnerability across U.S. national parks (National Park Service. 2014. Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment Framework for U.S. National Parks. National Park Service, Natural Resource Stewardship and Science, Washington, DC.)
The proposed project with the University of Washington will build on that initial effort with two main objectives:
• Develop alternative approaches for the National Park Service to provide climate change vulnerability information across the system pertinent to management of key resources.
• Develop a park-level framework to allow staff at an individual park with limited data to formulate an approach for assessing vulnerability of key resources.
Issues that need to be addressed include:
• Ways that NPS and its partners can most effectively provide scientifically sound information for hundreds of different natural, cultural, and infrastructure resources whose characteristics vary considerably among and within 407 separate parks, provided with a modest budget.
• Systems to prioritize future vulnerability assessments for funding.
• Approaches to efficiently assess vulnerability for regional collections of small, but similar parks.
• Methods to assist staff at individual parks with little or no site-specific resource sensitivity or adaptive capacity information.
UW and NPS staff will engage in targeted discussions to share, develop, and critically examine ideas that can address these issues and meet the project objectives, obtaining input from regional and field-based NPS science and resource management staff during product development. If spatial analyses, such as gap analyses that have commonly been used to identify gaps in the coverage of conservation goals, can facilitate this work, UW and NPS will collaborate on those analyses.
The final product will be a report providing results for the two project objectives, as well as recommendations for additional high priority work that may be warranted.