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Assessment of Watershed Vulnerability to Climate Change White River National Forest March, 2012 Prepared by: Mark Weinhold Forest Hydrologist White River National Forest Glenwood Springs, Colorado 112 Assessing the Vulnerability of Watersheds to Climate Change
White River National Forest Watershed Vulnerability Assessment, Rocky Mountain Region (R2) BACKGROUND The White River National Forest is located in west central Colorado, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in the Rocky Mountain Region (R2) of the USFS. Over the 2.3 million acre forest, elevations start from a low of about 5,500 feet and rise to include several peaks over 14,000 feet. Glaciation has shaped the higher elevations. Granitic rocks are prevalent on the eastern side of the forest; sedimentary formations dominate the western side. Most of the precipitation falls as snow in the winter, although summer thunderstorms are common. Snowmelt from the forest into the Colorado River provides water to 27 million people in 7 states and two countries (Painter et al. 2010). Peak flows are generally associated with snowmelt, except for the western edge of the forest. The White River is the most visited National Forest in the country, largely because of winter sports. Most of Colorado’s largest ski areas (Vail, Keystone, Breckenridge, Aspen, etc.) are permit holders on the Forest. Consequently, there is a keen interest in how a changing climate may affect air temperatures and precipitation. INTRODUCTION Aquatic biological systems, such as those supported by National Forests, have evolved under certain climatic conditions. As the climate changes, it is reasonable to anticipate that a watershed’s ecological or biological values could also change. The analysis described herein is an attempt to apply expected changes in climate to large portions of the landscape, and determine which areas (and their associated resource values) are least resilient and therefore most susceptible to adverse effects from a changing climate. The objective of this effort is to define a process that sorts blocks of the landscape (HUC-6 subwatersheds in this case) into categories that express their relative vulnerability to climate change. By way of analogy, we propose to take all the subwatersheds on the forest and (mentally) shake them through a series of sieves in order to identify those that have the least resiliency to the anticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, and runoff. Because this process is intended to cover large landscapes (2.3 million acres in this case), it is necessary to rely on existing data. The GIS queries that make up the basis for the assessment rely on common corporate layers from either the Forest Service or state agencies. A key step at the outset of this process was the identification of an appropriate scale of analysis. Since the analysis is aquatics-based, watershed boundaries were chosen. Because subwatersheds generally coincide with the management scale of most Forest activities, and are also small enough to allow local expression of factors such as aspect, elevation, vegetation type, etc., they were chosen as the unit of analysis. The schematic in Figure 1 shows the general thought process behind the analysis protocol. Resource values (for example, a sensitive species of trout), are supported by a complex interaction of ecological landscape-scale drivers. These drivers define the ecological context (environment) of the watershed and can include such attributes as geology, aspect, precipitation, and glaciation, etc. Changes to this environment occur constantly, but large changes from anthropogenic or climatic stressors may affect the resiliency of the resource value of concern. Determining how these ecological and anthropogenic characteristics interact with anticipated climatic stressors to affect the relative resiliency of each subwatershed is the objective of this analysis. 113 Assessing the Vulnerability of Watersheds to Climate Change
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AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Authors* M
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ASSESSSING THE VULNERABILITY OF WAT
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staff; the task group included repr
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Figure 2. Conceptual model for asse
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Figure 3. Density of springs and sm
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Using Historic Data One finding con
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NF (Region 8) relied on information
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level of uncertainty. Though there
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climate (Casola et al. 2005). Only
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sensitivity. Most were derived from
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The sensitivity evaluation typicall
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in exposure. The result of combinin
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highest priority for management act
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to information affected the assessm
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with and rely on in many resource d
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Pilot National Forest Reports Conte
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Assessment of Watershed Vulnerabili
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Gallatin National Forest Watershed
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Helena National Forest Watershed Vu
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Sawtooth National Forest Watershed
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Shasta Trinity National Forest Wate
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Umatilla National Forest Watershed
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Ouachita National Forest Watershed
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Chequamegon-‐Nicolet National F
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Chugach National Forest Watershed V
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