Research to understand, anticipate, and adapt to global change requires a cross-disciplinary investigation of how factors such as land use and climate are altering ecosystems today and in the future. We seek to host a workshop that engages a diverse community of researchers with strong backgrounds in forecasting and future scenarios research and a demonstrated commitment to making this work an LTER network-wide activity. The workshop would focus on the modeling component of this activity, with the goal of creating a robust forecasting tool that can address major scientific questions and challenges for society, including: (1) how will shifting natural and cultural processes affect a region?s future? (2) how will these changes influence a region?s natural infrastructure including carbon sequestration, water availability, habitat, and natural resources, and (3) how and why do regions differ in their vulnerability, resilience, and adaptability to global change? Products of the workshop will include the initial development of a cross-site model framework for the project; a strategy for confronting logistical barriers to the modeling effort; and a critical assessment of the staff and resources needed at each of the participating LTER sites for the project to succeed.
Thinking of possible scenarios is among the most promising approaches to addressing the ecological and socioeconomic challenges of global change. The network-wide nature of this activity will engage regional clusters of sites and allow them to pool resources and expertise on shared ecosystem types, stakeholder groups, land use issues, and other factors. The initial and ongoing work of the project will have major societal benefits through direct engagement of diverse stakeholder communities in the creation of the tool (policy and decision makers, managers, community and business leaders, educators, and a wide array of scientists in different disciplines) and through its direct focus on addressing societal and scientific questions.
Scenario studies have emerged as a powerful approach for synthesizing diverse forms of research and for articulating and evaluating alternative socioecological futures. Unlike predictive modeling, scenarios do not attempt to forecast the precise or probable state of any variable at a given point in the future. Instead, comparisons among a set of contrasting scenarios are used to understand the systemic relationships and dynamics of complex socioecological systems and to define a range of possibilities and uncertainties in quantitative and qualitative terms. Scenario studies offer a flexible framework for the integrating the best available ecological science into the myriad of uncertainties that are inherent in global change. Using scenarios large ecological research programs, like LTER, NEON, ULTRA, and others, can lead societal discussion regarding the future of their landscapes. The core strengths of the LTER network in particular—its history of long-term, place-based studies, its commitment to integrative research across disciplines, and its diversity of landscapes, stakeholders, and disturbance regimes—make it ideally suited to leading scenario studies in each of the landscapes where LTER is present. As such, we suggest that scenario studies be advanced in collaboration with many other research groups and agencies as a network-wide activity to promote research in social-ecological systems and cross-site comparative analyses across the network. As a programmatic activity an LTER Scenario Program would: (1) promote research that helps society anticipate and adapt to global change, (2) encourage broad-scale comparative investigations across LTER sites, and (3) increase the saliency of LTER science at regional and national scales. We are involved in a pilot scenarios project to examine alternative futures for the forest of Massachusetts. We formed an 'informed stakeholder group' that included representatives from Massachusetts state agencies, NGOs, and research institutions. Working with the stakeholders the crafted three narratives that bracketed a range of plausible land use and climate futures, looking out fifty years: (1) Free Market Future - Environmental regulations are rolled back; weakened zoning laws allow for proliferating sprawl, subdivisions, and a 125% increase in development; reduced funding for conservation; intensive harvesting increases. (2) Regional Self Sufficiency Future - Fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive and society adjusts; demand for woody biomass increases; demand for local food increases; increased development of tightly spaced housing. (3) Green Investment Future - Development is strongly targeted towards redevelopment of small cities; protection of forest and farm lands is paralleled by an increase in sustainable harvesting, large forest reserves, and local sources of food. Alternate energy capacity increases; carbon caps are enforced; and use of biomass for fuel increases dramatically. After forming consensus on the narratives, we translated scenarios into rule-sets that informed landscape simulations, which quantified changes in species composition, carbon dynamics, and landscape structure. We found that within a fifty year temporal horizon, direct climate impacts on forests were minor in comparison to the indirect effects resulting from changes in land use that are a response to climate change, such as in increased reliance on forests for bioenergy and forest conversion to produce food locally.
