Climate change, a major landscape stressor, is predicted to substantially alter ecosystem characteristics. In semi-arid regions where water availability is a crucial concern, wetlands constitute a critical, though highly sensitive and dynamic, ecosystem component. Altered temperature and precipitation regimes under climate change may affect wetland ephemerality, or the persistence of wetlands across the growing season. Our research combines remote sensing, field observations, and model-building to develop a novel, cost-effective, and large-scale method for relating the effects of climate change to wetland ephemerality. By using field observations to train remotely sensed data, we classified wetland ephemerality in the Plains and Prairie Pothole Region, a highly productive yet sensitive ecosystem, under a range of climatic conditions representing potential changes to temperature, and precipitation amount and timing. Our approach resulted in highly accurate classifications of wetlands of varying size and ephemerality. We found that wetland ephemerality was best predicted by precipitation in the form of snow. Lastly, we observed an increase in highly ephemeral and ephemeral wetlands compared to current conditions under climate change. These results have important implications for wetland biodiversity and genetic connectivity of wetland-dependent species, such as amphibians, that require a network of wetlands for dispersal.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.