Climate change in wildland management: taking the long view

Abstract

Climate constitutes one of the great determinants of all natural environments. As such, it goes a long way in accounting for the distributions of the plant and animal species that inhabit the Sierra Nevada today. Most land managers are well aware that climate has changed over geologic time—indeed, one needs to look no farther than the polished rock of high Sierra Nevadan canyons to see evidence that a climate conducive to large-scale glaciations existed in the past. And most land managers accept that these past climate changes must have brought about shifts in distributions of the biota. But many still tend to view modern climate (defined, for present purposes, as that of the past 120 years) as being both long established and "normal." In this view, climates of the pre-modern period are treated as long gone (and thus largely irrelevant to land management) and as mere deviations from "normality

Parent Publication

• Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium

Citation

Stine, Scott. 2004. Climate change in wildland management: taking the long view. In: Murphy, Dennis D. and Stine, Peter A., editors. Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-193. Albany, CA: Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: 51-55