HR: 11:20h
AN: U52A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Mountain Systems, Persistent Drought and the Vulnerability of Ecosystem Services: A Case Study from Glacier National Park, USA
AU: * Graumlich, L J
EM: lisa@montana.edu
AF: Big Sky Institute, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AU: Pederson, G T
EM: gpederson@montana.edu
AF: Big Sky Institute, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AU: Fagre, D
EM: dan_fagre@usgs.gov
AF: USGS Rocky Mountain Science Center, Glacier National Park, West Glacier, MT 59936 United States
AU: Gray, S T
EM: sgray@montana.edu
AF: USGS Desert Lab, 1675 West Anklam Road, Tucson, AZ 85745 United States
AB: The recent, persistent drought in the Western United States has invigorated interest in the findings of paleoclimatologists indicating that precipitation anomalies of a decade or more in duration are a substantial component of natural climatic variability over the past millennium. Further, we have accumulating evidence that large-scale, persistent climate features, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, can entrain ecosystem processes at regional scales. Demographic processes in fish, forests, and ungulates stand out as particularly compelling examples. These oft-cited examples are also interesting because they demonstrate that the sustainable provision of "ecosystem services" (i.e., the benefits people obtain from ecosystems) is subject to decadal-scale climatic variability. In this paper, we present a regional example of how precipitation varies at decade and longer time scales at Glacier National Park, Montana, USA. We examine how the climate variability expressed in Glacier National Park is coherent with larger regional patterns in Western North America and is associated with indices of large-scale atmospheric circulation features. We then explore how such variability might affect the ecosystem services offered by Glacier National Park. Our goal is to broaden the discussion of the impacts of climatic variability on protected areas by defining linkages between drought, climate regimes and the sustainable provision of ecosystem services. Decade and longer climate anomalies, and the attendant regime shift behavior, poses challenges for the management of ecosystem services in three ways. First, long-term climate reconstructions challenge the conventional strategy of defining mean, or average, conditions as a management tool. Second, step-like changes from one climate regime to another are often dramatic and may provide evidence of change that, in turn, may (or may not) represent human-induced changes. Third, decade-length persistence of either deficits or abundances of climate-related services solidify institutional arrangements that, in the long run, may not be robust under global climate change scenarios. After exploring this question in the data-rich context of Glacier National Park, we will suggest the broader implications of decade and longer scale variability for the services that we have come to expect from our parks and wildlands.
DE: 9350 North America
DE: 4805 Biogeochemical cycles (1615)
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 1863 Snow and ice (1827)
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting