Setting the stage for climate change scenario planning: Whitebark pine and American pika in the Sierra Nevada, Klamath, and Upper Columbia Basin Inventory and Monitoring Networks

Kellermann, Jherime; Rodhouse, Thomas; Nesmith, Jonathan; Chung-MacCoubrey, Alice

Climate models project a range of potential future conditions in our national parks and protected areas, which necessitates strategic management plans that acknowledge significant uncertainty. Likewise, the ecological impacts of changing policy and political environments, social perspectives, and technological capacities across biogeographic regions are currently highly uncertain. Scenario planning is a widely used tool that integrates current knowledge and conditions with modeled projections and their associated uncertainty. By identifying important drivers and indicators of change, knowledge gaps, idiosyncrasies of place, and possible conflicts or resistance points, we can explore uncertainties, prioritize actions and resources, optimize our preparedness, limit future risk in our management strategies, and increase our potential to respond to change with greater efficiency, speed and confidence. Effective scenario planning requires substantial initial preparation. It requires building a core project team, identifying the strategic challenges and goals, compiling a baseline of the best available information on relevant science, contemporary socio-political perspectives, and technological challenges, and identifying gaps and uncertainties in this information. This project initiated the Orientation and Exploration phases of scenario planning (NPS 2013) to build a foundation for future scenario development actions across three National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring Networks: Klamath, Sierra Nevada, and Upper Columbia Basin. This report is intended to inform resource managers, planners, and scientists considering new scenario planning efforts and/or those who are concerned with the conservation and management of natural resources within or shared with our three network regions. The available guides and handbooks for scenario planning lack specific experiential details on “getting started.” Therefore, we present both 1) our recommendations and lessons learned from the process of initiating scenario planning for a large, diverse biogeographic region, and 2) the results of our scenario planning efforts to date. Our initial intent was to conduct scenario planning for montane and high elevation ecosystems. However, we were advised by the NPS Climate Change Response Program to minimize the inherent complexity in an ecosystem approach. Thus, we elected to focus on two species of conservation concern, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and American pika (Ochotona princeps). These species occur in all regions, have significant range overlap, have established monitoring protocols, and are relatively well studied at multiple scales. Furthermore, during the last glacial period, they both had high range overlap and experienced range expansion, greater connectivity and gene flow, followed by range retraction and fragmentation since. Additionally, since they are phylogenetically disparate, contrasting these species provides unique insight into the drivers of change in montane and high elevation ecosystems as well as a diversity of low elevation habitats where pikas occur. In order to review the current state of knowledge and identify key drivers of change and their associated uncertainties, we invited a group of experts from agency and academic backgrounds to two separate workshops—one for each of our focal species. In addition to the valuable information we learned from our invited experts we also learned several important organizational lessons to this stage of scenario planning relevant to a small project with limited time and funding: 1) keep it small and focused and 2) invite a professional scenario planner, 3) provide materials in advance, 4) capture everything, and 5) eat well!

Setting the stage for climate change scenario planning: Whitebark pine and American pika in the Sierra Nevada, Klamath, and Upper Columbia Basin Inventory and Monitoring Networks

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