Recent Climate Changes Across the Great Plains and Implications for Natural Resource Management Practices

Abstract The Great Plains region plays an important role in providing water and land resources and habitat for wildlife and livestock, crops, energy production, and other critical ecosystem services to support rural livelihoods. The semiarid conditions of the region and tight coupling of livelihood enterprises with ecosystem services creates a situation of increased sensitivity to climate changes and enhanced vulnerability among the rural communities and Native American nations across the region. Recent climate conditions associated with warming trends, and altered atmospheric flows have resulted in rapid onset of drought conditions and other extreme weather events across the region that are changing seasonal patterns of temperature and precipitation and warming trends. Projected climate changes provided in the fourth US National Climate Assessment indicate that potential warming and variability of precipitation will further increase drought and extreme weather events. Recent research and assessment efforts of current and projected climate changes in the Great Plains indicate that rural communities and ecosystems are becoming more vulnerable to changes associated with warming trends, droughts, and increased variability in precipitation. These climate changes are having differential impacts on ecosystem services that are critical to livelihood enterprises. Strategies for how resource managers and the research community can better collaborate and more effectively codesign and coproduce efforts to understand and to respond to these challenges are needed.