Speaker: Kyra Clark-Wolf, Ph.D.

Abstract: Climate change adaptation provides a lens through which natural resource management can adjust or respond to the effects of current and expected future climate change, including the potential for widespread ecological transformations. Yet, uncertainty about how ecosystems may respond under future conditions poses significant challenges for adaptation planning. Uncertainties stem from incomplete understanding of complex ecosystem dynamics, barriers to modeling that complexity, and the potential for novel future conditions and non-stationary ecosystem responses. In this talk, I discuss how paleoecological data can fill a key knowledge gap by characterizing ecosystem responses under long-term environmental changes and providing context for contemporary trends, drawing on a study of fire-regime shifts in Rocky Mountain subalpine forests. Moving beyond this specific example, I discuss principles to help account for uncertainty in climate change adaptation planning through the use of scenarios. Scenario-based approaches recognize the challenges inherent in forecasting future climate change and its effects over management-relevant timescales of years to decades and emphasize exploring the range of plausible futures, rather than planning for a single or a narrow set of likely outcomes. I discuss methods for developing scenarios that integrate environmental sciences and conclude with research needs to support climate adaptation.

Bio: Dr. Kyra Clark-Wolf is a Postdoctoral Associate in CIRES at CU Boulder, studying ecological transformation in a context of changing climate and disturbance regimes. Her research interests integrate perspectives from paleoecology, fire ecology, and ecosystem ecology. Kyra joined CIRES as part of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center to work on the development of ecological scenarios to inform natural resource management using the Resist, Accept, Direct (RAD) framework. She received a B.A. in Environmental Science from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in Systems Ecology from the University of Montana. She lives in Logan, UT, and enjoys hiking, baking, and botanizing.