Geology topics

Lara J. Hansen

Publications and source records attributed to Lara J. Hansen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2024

Innovation in climate adaptation: Harnessing innovation for effective biodiversity and ecosystem adaptation

Climate change poses growing risks to species, ecosystems, and people, and is challenging many of the assumptions that underpin modern conservation practice. As climate impacts accelerate, conventional conservation approaches are being compromised and losing their effectiveness. As a result, there is an urgent need to not only center climate adaptation in conservation policy and practice, but for adaptation responses to be bolder and more innovative. Innovation in Climate Adaptation is designed to address this need by promoting creativity and innovation in the practice of climate adaptation for biodiversity and ecosystem conservation. The guide is not about promoting innovation for the sake of innovation; rather, it is intended to help policymakers, researchers, and resource managers harness the power of innovation to achieve more effective adaptation outcomes.

Report↗

USGS2013

The added complications of climate change: Understanding and managing biodiversity and ecosystems

Ecosystems around the world are already threatened by land-use and land-cover change, extraction of natural resources, biological disturbances, and pollution. These environmental stressors have been the primary source of ecosystem degradation to date, and climate change is now exacerbating some of their effects. Ecosystems already under stress are likely to have more rapid and acute reactions to climate change; it is therefore useful to understand how multiple stresses will interact, especially as the magnitude of climate change increases. Understanding these interactions could be critically important in the design of climate adaptation strategies, especially because actions taken by other sectors (eg energy, agriculture, transportation) to address climate change may create new ecosystem stresses.

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment↗

USGS2012

The Adaptation for Conservation Targets (ACT) Framework: A tool for incorporating climate change into natural resource management

As natural resource management agencies and conservation organizations seek guidance on responding to climate change, myriad potential actions and strategies have been proposed for increasing the long-term viability of some attributes of natural systems. Managers need practical tools for selecting among these actions and strategies to develop a tailored management approach for specific targets at a given location. We developed and present one such tool, the participatory Adaptation for Conservation Targets (ACT) framework, which considers the effects of climate change in the development of management actions for particular species, ecosystems and ecological functions. Our framework is based on the premise that effective adaptation of management to climate change can rely on local knowledge of an ecosystem and does not necessarily require detailed projections of climate change or its effects. We illustrate the ACT framework by applying it to an ecological function in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, USA)—water flows in the upper Yellowstone River. We suggest that the ACT framework is a practical tool for initiating adaptation planning, and for generating and communicating specific management interventions given an increasingly altered, yet uncertain, climate.

Environmental Management↗