Abstract
The impacts of climate driven change on ecosystem processes and biodiversity are pervasive and still not fully understood. Biodiversity loss, range shifts, and phenological mismatches are all issues associated with a changing climate that are having significant impacts on individuals and ecosystems alike. Investigating and identifying effective management strategies that can conserve vulnerable species should be the focus of current and future climate change research. We investigated thermal properties of habitat for an imperiled grouse (Greater Prairie‐chicken; Tympanuchus cupido) in tallgrass prairie characterized by heterogeneous fire and grazing (the fire‐grazing interaction). We examined operative temperature at varying scales relevant to grouse and used historic and forecasted climate data to estimate thermal stress during nesting activities. We found that heterogeneous grasslands have high thermal variability with operative temperature ranging as much as 23°C across the landscape. Grouse exhibited strong selection for cooler thermal environments as nest sites were as much as 8°C cooler than the surrounding landscape, and fine‐scale differences in thermal environments were nearly 4°C cooler than sites within 2 m of nests. Additionally, forecasted climate scenarios indicate grouse will experience 2–4 times the number of hours above thermal stress thresholds, emphasizing the need for informed conservation management. Overall, these data provide evidence that variation in grassland structure resulting from the fire‐grazing interaction may be important in moderating thermal environments and highlights the complex and interactive effects of restored ecological processes on ecosystems.
Highlights
The impacts of climate driven change on ecosystems are widespread and pervasive (Parmesan and Yohe 2003)
We found that heterogeneous grasslands have high thermal variability with operative temperature ranging as much as 238C across the landscape when air temperatures are .308C (Fig. 1A), creating the opportunity for grouse and other organisms to seek thermal environments that maximize their chance for survival
They expose the thermal variability of tallgrass prairie with restored ecological processes, show that reproduction of imperiled grouse are correlated with thermal properties, and illustrate the complexity of thermal environments in plant communities that are often viewed as structurally simplistic
Summary
The impacts of climate driven change on ecosystems are widespread and pervasive (Parmesan and Yohe 2003). Changes in the environment have increased biodiversity loss, impacted range shifts, and created phenological mismatches (Thomas and Lennon 1999, Both and Visser 2005, Dawson et al 2011). Biodiversity loss is the least reversible form of global change, and has been observed recently in numerous taxonomic groups Dawson et al 2011). Extinction risks are predicted to rise through the century in response to global climate change (Maclean and Wilson 2011). Understanding how species and populations respond to these changes is a problem for ecologists worldwide, and identifying and evaluating effective management strategies that can conserve vulnerable species should be a central tenant of global change research
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