Science Challenges in Supporting Adaptation Planning in Mountainous Terrain: Lessons from the NOAA climate assessment to inform the FWS Status Review of the American pika

This presentation will summarize results and some of the scientific challenges that were faced in preparing a NOAA rapid assessment of climate provided as input to the Fish & Wildlife Service review of the American Pika to determine if climate change risks warranted listing the species as endangered. NOAA provided FWS with an assessment of climate observations and projections of change in pika habitat, as a climatological context for the status review. We provided western regional detail based on existing observations and IPCC model projections and new findings from interpreting those observations and projections at smaller spatial scales. A key finding of the report is the large spatial scale of recent and projected warming trends in the West. The 2050 summer temperature projections average about 3°C higher than recent climatology for most of the western U.S., and for 22 locations representative of pika habitats. Statistically downscaled temperature projections were used to relate these large-scale trends to habitat elevation bands. Finally, we provided an expert judgment on the “foreseeable future” for climate for the review. This project required considering the observations and projections in the context of the heterogeneous terrain that is the habitat for many pika populations, and interpreting and interpolating information from often distant observing stations, or large-scale model grid-boxes to make inferences about conditions at finer scales. This presentation will discuss the findings of the report, and some of the strategies that we adopted for analyzing and presenting climate projections. The emphasis will be on this real-world example where time and resource constraints were paramount, as well as the need to use “best available science,” in the context of a formal policy process vs. time to develop new work. Some of the challenges we faced are applicable to many ecological applications and for many individual species, including the choice of the sources of climate projections, the interpretation of downscaled projections, the characterization of uncertainty, and how to combine information from multiple streams of climate projection information into a more robust inference about the future. While it is easy to be overwhelmed by uncertainty in a given location, it is important not to lose sight of the "big picture narrative" that is obtained from climate model projections.