Predicted Percent Change in Watershed Area with Critical Habitat from 2010 to 2100, California Rangeland Threats, summary by HUC watershed

This dataset displays the percent change in watershed area with critical habitat from 2010 to 2100 under A2 scenario.

IPCC Emission Scenarios:

A1B = wealth and technology
A2 = population pressures
B1 = sustainability

http://climate.calcommons.org//aux/rangeland/index.html

(Other climate change scenarios can be viewed by styling based on other attributes contained in this dataset)

Why Rangelands: The Central Valley of California, the surrounding foothills and the interior Coast Range include over 18 million acres of grassland. Most of this land is privately owned and managed for livestock production. Because grasslands are found in some of California's fastest-growing counties, they are severely threatened by land conversion and development. In addition climate change stresses grasslands by potentially changing water availability and species distributions.

Maintaining a ranching landscape can greatly support biodiversity conservation in the California Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) region. In addition ranches generate multiple ecosystem services—defined as human benefits provided by natural ecosystems—that carry considerable economic value, including livestock production, drinking and irrigation water, and carbon sequestration.

The Threat Assessment: We developed six scenarios organized around our management question: How can we maintain viable ranchland and their ecosystem services in light of future integrated threats? The scenarios represent alternative futures of climate/land use/hydrological change for the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition (Rangeland Coalition) focus area (the foothills around the Central Valley and most of the southern Inner Coast Range) (Figure 1). Detailed description of the scenarios is found here.

We used these scenarios to quantify and map three main rangeland ecosystem services—wildlife habitat, water supply, and carbon sequestration.