Climate, ecosystems, and land-use: Understanding environmental variability in human-dominated landscapes

• Chris Pyke

Abstract
Environmental variation creates both risk and opportunities for conservation. The implications of environmental variation in any particular situation vary depending on climatic processes, ecosystem responses, and land-use patterns. Consequently, it is necessary to understand potential interactions between these factors in order to design conservation strategies that use variation to reduce risk and take advantage of opportunities to increase species persistence. Informed action can offset the natural tendency for risk from environmental variation to increase as the total amount of habitat in a landscape decreases. The proposed research addresses this issue by: (1) simulating how climate, ecosystems, and land-use interact over time to change patterns of environmental variation, and (2) applying this framework to evaluate risks faced by vernal pool ecosystems in the Central Valley of California. The results of this work will help conservationists develop better tools for reserve design, understand processes underlying patterns of environmental variability, and manage local vernal pool landscapes to reduce risks associated with landscape and climate change.