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Climate and water balance change among public, private, and tribal lands within Greater Wild land Ecosystems across North Central USA

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Abstract

The remaining wildlands in the North Central US include varying proportions of public, private, and tribal lands across water balance ecotones. These wildlands may be highly vulnerable changing climate impacting their ability to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We quantified projected changes in growing season climate (temperature) and water balance (MI: moisture index) in Greater Wildland Ecosystems (GWEs) and land allocation types (public, private, and tribal lands) across Central Plains, Western Plains, and Western Mountains ecoregions of North Central US by using high-resolution climate data from GCM output of 1980–2005 to 2071–2099. We also tested for the evidence of systematic climatic bias on tribal lands, which are often claimed to be distributed non-randomly. We found that the historic temperature was lower for Western Mountains compared to Western and Central Plains’ GWEs. The climate model projected drier and warmer GWEs with a narrow difference in increased temperature (4.6 to 5.5 °C). The MI was projected to have the greatest decrease in Central Plains (− 28%) and the least in Western Plains (− -17%) GWEs. Our findings revealed that the GWEs and land allocation types are increasingly vulnerable to changing climate. We conclude that the distribution of tribal and public lands is not climatically biased in the historic period and the projected rates of change in climate are similar among land allocation types within each GWE. All GWEs, however, are projected to warm and undergo increasing aridity, which may challenge management to sustain ecological health and human wellbeing across all land allocation types.

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Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the thoughtful and constructive comments made by two anonymous reviewers to improve this manuscript.

Funding

Funding and support was received from U.S. Department of Interior North Central Climate Science Center (G14AP00181).

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  1. Arjun Adhikari

    Present address: Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Oklahoma State University, 008C Agricultural Hall, Stillwater, OK, 74078, USA

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  1. Department of Ecology, Montana State University, 310 Lewis Hall, Bozeman, MT, 59717, USA

    Arjun Adhikari & Andrew J. Hansen

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Projected absolute and relative changes in growing season temperature and MI in GWEs and land allocation types for historic (1980–2005) and future (2071–2099) period under CCSM4
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Table 2 Cohen’s effect size estimation among public, private, and tribal land allocations for mean MI (1981–2005) and (2071–2099) and their difference (2099–2005)
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Adhikari, A., Hansen, A.J. Climate and water balance change among public, private, and tribal lands within Greater Wild land Ecosystems across North Central USA. Climatic Change 152, 551–567 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2351-7

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