Back to the future: using historical climate variation to project near-term shifts in habitat suitable for coast redwood

Fernández, Miguel; Hamilton, Healy H.; Kueppers, Lara M.

doi:10.1111/gcb.13027

Back to the future: using historical climate variation to project near-term shifts in habitat suitable for coast redwood

Journal Article · Wed Sep 23 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Global Change Biology

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13027· OSTI ID:1511424

Fernández, Miguel ^[1]; Hamilton, Healy H. ^[2]; Kueppers, Lara M. ^[3]

Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States). Sierra Nevada Research Inst.; Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Dept. of Integrative Biology; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig (Germany)
NatureServe, Arlington, VA (United States)
Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States). Sierra Nevada Research Inst.; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Earth Sciences Division

Studies that mimic the effect of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems often use climate projections from downscaled global climate models (GCMs). These simulations are generally too coarse to capture patterns of fine-scale climate variation, such as the sharp coastal energy and moisture gradients associated with wind-driven upwelling of cold water. Coastal upwelling may limit future increases in coastal temperatures, compromising GCMs' ability to provide realistic scenarios of future climate in these coastal ecosystems. Taking advantage of naturally occurring variability in the high-resolution historic climatic record, we developed multiple fine-scale scenarios of California climate that maintain coherent relationships between regional climate and coastal upwelling. We compared these scenarios against coarse resolution GCM projections at a regional scale to evaluate their temporal equivalency. We utilized these historically based scenarios to estimate potential suitable habitat for coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens D. Don) under 'normal' combinations of temperature and precipitation, and under anomalous combinations representative of potential future climates. We found that a scenario of warmer temperature with historically normal precipitation is equivalent to climate projected by GCMs for California by 2020-2030 and that under these conditions, climatically suitable habitat for coast redwood significantly contracts at the southern end of its current range. Our results indicate that historical climate data provide a high-resolution alternative to downscaled GCM outputs for near-term ecological forecasts. This method may be particularly useful in other regions where local climate is strongly influenced by ocean-atmosphere dynamics that are not represented by coarse-scale GCMs.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: Save the Redwoods League; USDOE Office of Science (SC)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC02-05CH11231

OSTI ID:: 1511424

Journal Information:: Global Change Biology, Journal Name: Global Change Biology Journal Issue: 11 Vol. 21; ISSN 1354-1013

Publisher:: WileyCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Back to the future: using historical climate variation to project near-term shifts in habitat suitable for coast redwood

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