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Climate, vegetation and bird model summary report:

Washington Coastal Watershed

This report provides a summary of changes in modeled climate, vegetation and bird abundance between current (1980-2009) and future (2035-2064 & 2070-2099) time periods for the Washington Coastal HUC6 watershed.

Watershed Area

1.77247510^{6} hectares 4.379878410^{6} acres



Climate model results

Below you will find summaries of climate change projections for the Washington Coastal watershed. The climate models are results from observed climate and four future downscaled climate models.The downscaled climate dataset we used is the MACAv1-METDATA. It is a set of 21 CMIP5 GCM’s downscaled to 1/24 degree (approx. 4km) grid for the western United States, using a statistical downscaling method called Multivariate Constructed Analogs (MACA, Abatzolgou et al. 2012). MACA translates coarse-scale GCM output to a finer scale by using a training dataset (i.e., a meteorological observation dataset) to remove historical biases and match spatial patterns in climate model output. Each plot shows the mean value of each climate variable across the watershed. The error bars indicate the variaion across the watershed (1 standard deviation).



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Vegetation model summaries

We modeled the distribution of 59 vegetation classes. These classes are based on the finest level of classifcation in the National Landvocer classification system. The distribution of each vegetation class was modeled as a funcltion of climate, soil and dynamic general circulation model outputs. Each plot shows the mean probability of occurrence of a vegetation class across the watershed. The error bars indicate the spatial variability in the predicted probability of occurrence across the watershed.

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Bird Model Summaries

In the following figures we show summaries of the predicted index of abundance of xx bird species across the watershed. Each of the species we included in the analysis was selected as a focal species for five different broad habitat types. We group the bird species by habitat type in the plots below. The values in the plots represent the mean index of abundance for each species across the waterhed. The error bars indicate the spatial variation in the predicted abundance index across the watershed (1 standard deviation)



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References

Abatzoglou J.T. and Brown T.J. “A comparison of statistical downscaling methods suited for wildfire applications” International Journal of Climatology (2012),doi: 10.1002/joc.2312.

MACA data URL: http://maca.northwestknowledge.net/



For more information

Please contact:
Sam Veloz, Climate Adaptation Group Director, Point Blue Conservation Science. sveloz@pointblue.org. 707-781-2555 ex 308
John Kim, Biological Scientist, US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station. jbkim@fs.fed.us, 541-750-7287