Innovation Anthology #150: Mechanical Engineers
How fast the landscape changes due to climate warming is a major concern for ecologist Dr. Rick Schneider.
For the last year, he has been been analyzing various climate models for the Integrated Landscape Management program at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Schneider says climate induced change has already been documented in Alaska, where forests are moving up mountainsides and peatlands are drying out.
In Alberta, we’re already seeing the grassland encroach north into the parkland.
DR: RICK SCHNEIDER: None of these things happen gradually year by year. The way it actually happens is in fits and starts,
And so in 2002 and 2003 there we had a fairly severe drought over a lot of the lower parkland region. And so there are people right now working who have been doing flyovers and aerial mapping of the aspen forest there and trying to document the amount of die back. And what they’re finding, it’s sort of a moth eaten kind of change. Its sort of like getting eaten out from the inside, more holes, and they get bigger and start to coalesce and so on.
Predicting these changes depends on better understanding the link between drought, fire and vegetation.
Thanks today to the Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY,
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Dan Wolfe,
Syncrude Research and Development, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2008-07-10