Integrated coastal climate change vulnerability assessment: Fire Island National Seashore

Ricci, Glenn; Robadue, Donald; Rubinoff, Pam; Casey, Alanna; Babson, Amanda

A climate change vulnerability assessment, which integrated issues across natural resources, cultural resources, and facility assets, was conducted between November 2017 and March 2018 for Fire Island National Seashore (NS). This was a rapid assessment using existing data and expert knowledge through a series of three workshops to assess resource or asset specific vulnerability across three time frames—2020, 2050, and 2100—and the risk to the park’s goals. The methods were based on an assessment that was piloted for Colonial National Historical Park (Ricci et al. 2019a) and were refined through this process and are described in Ricci et al. (2019b). Climate stressors used in the vulnerability assessment included sea level rise, storm surge, flooding, erosion, precipitation and temperature changes, drought and ground water change. One limitation of this study is that the sea level rise scenarios used (Caffrey, 2015) are substantially lower than what is currently being used by New York State and other local partners; it’s likely the projections assigned to time frames may occur significantly earlier. This assessment is a method to combine these three resource types parkwide and to seek areas of integration that could increase the depth of understanding of the issues. The assessment broadly covers all of the resources in Fire Island NS, excluding the residential communities. While it was beyond the scope of this assessment to evaluate non-park resources in the 17 residential communities interspersed among the federal lands of Fire Island NS, members of the communities were invited to participate in the process and the connected resources and goals between the park and the communities is reflected in the discussions and results. The term communities in this report refers to these 17 residential communities; other communities which are also important, such as those on Long Island, are considered within partners. The results of the assessment are presented for each of the workgroups: cultural resources, natural resources, and facility assets. It is important to recognize, however, that vulnerability and adaptive capacity across these different resource types can interact or conflict and are better considered in aggregate where they overlap in geography. Three key focal areas were selected for integrated discussion based on areas where there were combinations of high priority resource types: Fire Island Light Station complex, Island Change on the Bayside, and the William Floyd Estate. Figure 1 indicates locations of these focal areas, highlights locations of other park resources and areas discussed and includes results from the vulnerability scores in the 2050 timeframe for all resources with geographic data.

Integrated coastal climate change vulnerability assessment: Fire Island National Seashore

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