Speakers

Gregor Schuurman

National Park Service Ecologist, The Climate Change Response Program

Joe Meyer

Associate of Gregor Schuurman, Restoration Ecologist

Yosemite National Park, Sierra Nevada, California, Sept 27 2016

Introductory Note

Gregor was tour guide for a Society of Environmental Journalists visiting group. His biography is extensive and his stories very interesting. Thus we were lucky to spend a full day with him discussing how he deals with adaptation and anticipates impacts to come – not to forget the question of new terminology to use in these days of climate change impacts. He’s travelled widely, worked in many National Parks, and fortunately was willing to share his many insights – and unanswered questions – with us. We had the whole day for questions and attempted answers!

Editor’s Note:  As we were a group of journalists full of questions, it unfortunately was impossible to get names of each questioner without being annoyingly disruptive. Thus, we have just identified them as JOURNALISTS.

Gregor Schuurman speaking on adaptation to climate change.


Outline

A FOCUS on SPECIES ADAPTATION TODAY
GENERAL CONCERNS
ADAPTATION to BRACKISH WATER
FIRE: NO LONGER a NATURAL PROCESS
SCENARIO PLANNING
CASES PLANNING for GLOBAL WARMING
CONFLICTS OVER SCENARIO PLANNING
SPECIES STUCK DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
WHITE SANDS N.M. and WATER
RESILIENCE-ADAPTATION-RESISTENCE-NORMAL

All images © Alison M Jones. All rights reserved. 

Key Quotes  What we’ve done in the past on our landscapes has constrained adaptive capacities of these species. We’ve put barriers in their way. We’ve reduced their population size. We re-divided their genetic diversity. We’ve done all those things. Some we can reverse; some we can’t, obviously. –Gregor Shuurman

We recognize that we’re not really in control of this phenomenon. There are changes going on in the industry that are autonomous. The best we can do as a business is to take notes, pay attention to those changes and try to steer – to the degree we can – in the context of change that we can’t control.” – Lars Ullrich, Metallica drummer

It’s ironic that we are using “scenario planning” that the fuel industry [Shell Oil] advanced to now deal with the consequences of the fossil fuel industry! — Gregor Shuurman

A FOCUS on SPECIES ADAPTATION TODAY

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  I’ll get our conversations started, but I’d rather respond to your questions. Regarding my biography, I grew up in South Africa in the first decade of my life, thus my favorite park is South Africa’s Krueger National Park. It’s a big park. (Editor’s Note: 7,523 sq miles; and 220 x 40 miles, or 360 x 60 kms.) It is where my grandad hunted in the 1930s; and now it’s a park. It’s where my connections were. Scott Gediman talked to you this morning about Yosemite was his park in the same way, and how when he was young, he wanted to be a ranger. Well, I wanted to be a park ranger. I was a small kid then. I went to college and on to grad school and ended up being a basic scientist. That was my route, based on a desire to work conservation in some way. And per my advisor, the way that you do that is you become a professor.

I went down that road and did my dissertation work in Africa in the Okavango Delta. It was very basic research on how savannahs work. I was trying to get back to my childhood; but doing so from an American platform. From the Okavango, I came back to the States to work for USGS on research, and then at state agency, the Wisconsin DNR [Dept. of Natural Resources] on a butterfly that seems to be climate sensitive.

There had been great success conserving this species since 1992 when it was listed as endangered, but its distribution is a few counties north and south and it goes from Minnesota to Maine. Its distribution on a map looked like a plant hardiness zone, and that pulled me into thinking about adaptation in the middle of the country. I had an opportunity to jump into that realm of natural resource people, facing the challenge of our age, in a way.

I feel tremendously lucky to have worked on this platform for the Park Service for 413 units: from American Samoa to Guam to Alaska; across the mainland and down through the Caribbean – almost a quarter of the globe. It’s a big reach.

I’ve now been in the National Park Service for 3 years as a full-time adaptation person. Three years doesn’t sound like much, but it makes me kind of a middle-ager, I think, in the adaptation realm. It’s really a decade, since you look into the future much further. In terms of critical mass and our discussions, we realize we must mitigate – and we must reduce our emissions. If we don’t start adapting to what’s already baked in the cake, we’ll lose the battle. So, in the last 10 years, adaptation has become sort of an important part of climate change response.

GENERAL CONCERNS

Where do I want to go from here?  Let me pause to ask what you want to hear about and ask.

JOURNALIST  Adaptation to brackish and salinized water….

JOURNALIST  Specific species that are adapting or migrating….

JOURNALIST  Success stories of species adapting well to climate change,,,.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Those are good questions. Prompt me again because I’ll first take a step back a little bit. Basically, we use a very simple definition in our work for “adaptation”:  the ability to moderate harm and to take advantage of opportunities. 

So, the question about species that might be doing well under climate change is challenge for me, but it’s an important concept and certainly a possibility. Furthermore, it’s an important thought to bear in mind. Generically, you may be in a place that’s getting wetter these days – like the Midwest or the Northeast. There may be species in those regions that will do better under new circumstances that may be quite rare. 

There’s as much reason to think about getting a lift from changes as there is not. That is what we do as humans! I have a slide that I can’t quite recapture verbatim, but it’s Stephen Hawking talking about how human adaptation is a sign of intelligence. [Editor’s Note: “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” This comment suggests that intelligence goes beyond knowledge and intellect to include the capacity to adjust, respond effectively and even thrive when faced with change.]

So, a fundamental argument is we’re not doing anything today that people haven’t always done anyway. We’re trying to be structured as we’re trying to be forward looking. That’s what this field is. Tools, concepts and examples are critical for moving things forward.

Broadly, the biggest concepts we face are:  what are we adapting for, what should we do, what can we do? This is a real challenge because agencies like ours here at Yosemite National Park – and many of our partner agencies – are comfortable practicing traditional conservation. We are comfortable resisting and reversing human impacts to natural systems. We have a hard time accepting change and just letting it happen –  although we also do a good deal of that. 

Trees are dying of drought here. We can’t stop that everywhere; but we can stop it in a few places if we want to. And so, we must consider expanding our management paradigm to get comfortable with managing change – in some cases, facilitating change. That requires understanding that that’s a very delicate, careful discussion to have. That’s an expansion beyond traditional conservation that climate change is now asking us to try to do because of the novelty of the circumstances and the degree and magnitude of change.

And so, one of the big things – big mantras – we talk about is managing for change and not just persistence. That’s very different from saying management change. It’s just adding that on. And what you would manage for in any circumstance will vary based on time, space and the resource.

I was talking about an example of the Harner Group butterfly. Indiana Dune National Lakeshore is the last site where it has existed within the Park Service. It’s been in decline for 15 years and hasn’t been seen for 2 years. It’s the warmest site this species had occupied; and that population has declined steadily for 15 years. So, the real question is whether that’s a wise setting in which to invest an effort to restore that population, given that some decades ago that property literally  moved out of what we’ve called the Karner Climate Space.

These are difficult decisions; but we advocate being very clear-eyed, clear-headed and transparent about recognizing such changes and using sound processes for assessing their adaptation.

I give you one example of working with change, rather than resisting change. I’ve been asked about examples of using “managed-free locations” when moving species to suit shifting climate spaces. This is a topic I think we’ll hear about much more in coming years. There are concerns about individuals doing this on their own.

A friend in the National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska says that if a fire burns down their spruce forest, they get grassland – because the trees that might be suitable for the soon-to-be climate of the future do not exist, except on private property right next to this pine refuge, that people have brought in. So we need to think carefully about this challenge and engage with this process. We can’t be passive and keep practicing traditional conservation while our neighbors bring in who-knows-what genotype of who-knows-what species that are very suitable in our refuge.

JOURNALIST   What group of people do you mean when you say, “our neighbors”?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Private citizens who live next to a protected refuge. They like trees. But since spruce don’t do so well anymore, they bring in an exotic species from a thousand miles away. So, that’s sort of a vignette raising the question of whether we want to engage in replacement species just because of other people or other agencies create this issue – consciously or not.

The only example of a managed relocation I know of involves bull trout. It’s an endangered North American species, challenged by warming waters. It’s thermally sensitive and challenged by non-native lake trout – which have been introduced broadly across the west. Our program was not at all connected with it. I heard about it on NPR while picking up my kid from daycare. I immediately called the fisheries biologist and got the story. They elected to move some of the bull trout above a waterfall, a natural barrier in that drainage, to escape both the lake trout and warming temperatures. And they did that in the past year or two.

However, and very significantly, that upstream portion was negatively impacted. It wasn’t pristine, so they weren’t introducing a predator to a naturally predator-free place. Those considerations become really important in this kind of work.

It’s an example how every small bit of a management-initiated expansion of a threatened native species to deal with climate change can involve other threats.

ALISON JONES/NWNL  Isn’t that situation also occurring in Yellowstone Lake?  I was there in ’07 and they were talking then about the lake trout and bull trout.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Yes, they have the same issues.

Ponderosa pines dying from drought in Yosemite.

ADAPTATION to BRACKISH WATER

JOURNALIST  We’re having more brackish and salinated water where we didn’t have it. Are you’re seeing any adaptation practices for that situation?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  It’s not an area I work on. My focus is on terrestrial species.

JOURNALIST   I’m referring to the Everglades.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Do you know what they’re doing there in terms of adaptation? You see, it involves managing canals to deal with salt-water intrusion. They have many canals that are great for catching bass and thus very popular, yet there are complex conflicts.

That is analogous to our Merced River restoration mantra that its healthy restored systems -logically and through experience – are better able to handle shocks, disturbances and change than impoverished, degraded, messed up systems. Yes, we know that, and that’s important. 

Now with Pacific Islands facing salt-water intrusion because of rising sea level, I don’t think anybody has a solution. That is where this sea-level rise is such a problem.

JOURNALIST  This is not a National Park question, since National Parks don’t recede after a fire. But National Forests do. What is your speculation regarding the benefits of receding species that move to that climate zone but weren’t already there?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  I’m not a restorer but my colleagues in Washington are talking about this very topic. This is a very alive discussion.

My boss likes to use the word pre-restoration. Can you restore in anticipation of emerging conditions? That’s a discussion that we’re involved in now. It’s a question we get a lot from parks as they start to grapple with climate change and wonder about this.

We see it happening on other lands. There is an important project in northeastern Minnesota facing The Nature Conservancy/TNC on a large landscape level. They are doing forest restoration and are facing historical impacts there. They’re “restoring forward,” so to speak.

What they are doing – and I’m not saying I advocate this right now, or that we’re doing it – but they are looking south and west, warmer and dryer and bring in seeds of the same species that are on site but genotypes that have been following warm and dry. And in a very experimental way, beginning that process.

Now we have a long history of moving animals and genes around and not all of it is very good and so there are some real question marks on all of this. At least managers are concerned about the landscape context in which this might happen, and about how what others are doing around us might influence an ecological balance even if we make no moves.

FIRE: NO LONGER a NATURAL PROCESS

JOE MEYERS  Regarding the question whether we reseed or replant after fire, the answer is NO. What’s changed is our conception of fire as a natural process. We don’t think the fire regime we see right now is a natural process. Because of climate change, it changed forest structure and fuel availability.

That’s a dilemma. We’re seeing human-caused changes in our fire regime. So, what do we do about that?  I want to echo, or affirm, what Gregg was saying. We’ll do restoration projects where we replant. If we’re trying to restore a riparian zone and the willows just aren’t there, then we must plant those willows to bring them back.

Yet our work is on a very small scale. Anything large scale would be very costly and labor intensive. We just don’t have the ability to do large-scale restoration. But regarding river restoration, we’ll definitely plant a riparian zone. Meadow restoration, same thing. We can do small scale. 

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  In thinking about species to be chosen, installations in the river, and all other risks, what possibilities are you contemplating as to how the future may play out? Here in California in general, you’re dealing with drought; but what about bigger, stronger storms? 

JOE MEYER Unknown.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  That’s a standard question we’re asked. “You’re restoring. What are you restoring for?  Are you restoring for 1980 mean conditions or are you restoring for what you see today? Or are you at least restoring with something in mind about climate trends and maybe where they’re heading?”

JOURNALIST  And, in an ecosystem, some species can move uphill faster or move farther than others. What do you do there?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Well, we’ve seen big change. Joe, check my numbers, but I feel that on average we’re seeing 500 feet of up movement over the course of the last century.

JOE MEYER  About 500 feet.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  There are two issues there. One is what happens to the Arctic or Alpine chipmunk as these temperatures continue to warm? Is it wise hard to retain that species? It would depend on answers to several questions:  What are the opportunities and the possibilities? What’s the biology of that species? How heterogeneous is that landscape?  Another important, emerging topic of interest is adaptive capacity.

What’s the capacity of that species to change?  Its behavior? It’s growth form?  Or whether it can undergo rapid evolution to tolerate this change? There’s work in Europe that shows changes in the colors of shells of native snails in Holland dealing with change in the thermal regime.

Earlier dates at which offspring are born in the red squirrel in Europe could create vulnerability. Vulnerability is composed of three things. One is exposure. For instance, different species have different exposures to climate change. Different populations of the same species may have different exposures based on where they occur – up and down a mountain or a north-south gradient.

For instance, in Zion and Cedar Lakes the pikas’ exposure to climate is consequential for them in populations further north or at higher elevations. So that’s exposure. The second part is sensitivity. To what degree are these species sensitive? Do they even notice? There’s a great amount of climate change going on. Does it cross thresholds for them or not? 

The analogy we often look for – and I think the analogy is better than the reality – is a complicated topic: people with fair skin dealing with sun burning. You can control your exposure or stay inside so that no matter how sensitive you are, you have no vulnerability. On the other hand, – like the pikas – you may be highly vulnerable, highly sensitive and  outside and thus facing high potential impact. 

Your innate sensitivity determines how much change you experience and your potential impact. Your realized impact is governed by whether you have some capacity to undergo change. In plants, the kinds of capacity we’re talking about is whether developing leaves that are waxier or more robust lose water at lower rates, change growth form, or invest more in roots in response to moisture stress and less above ground growth.

Changing wind and diurnal activities help species avoid the hottest part of the day, as do undergoing migratory or evolutionary changes, as I mentioned. We don’t know much about this topic. There’s concern from some of us about too much false hope. “Elephants will grow wings!” There’s a limit to how quickly and how much change one can ask for. Many species have low adaptive capacities. 

That butterfly I mentioned doesn’t migrate. It doesn’t live very long as a butterfly and it’s attached to a globally imperiled habitat and dependent on one host plant that is vulnerable to drought. So, it’s a high vulnerability, low adaptive-capacity species where we’ll watch the population blink out. We know what climate change will do to them if we don’t act.

What we’ve done in the past on our landscapes has constrained adaptive capacities of these species. We’ve put barriers in their way. We’ve reduced their population size. We re-divided their genetic diversity. We’ve done all those things. Some of those we can reverse; some of those we can’t, obviously. 

Joe Meyer speaking on Ponderosa pine drought mortality.

SCENARIO PLANNING

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Okay – scenario planning. When I was driving here yesterday, I was listening to Chris Hayes’ podcast and his next guest was Lars Ulrich, drummer and spokesperson for Metallica. He said to Lars: “Not all bands last 30 years or however long they’ve been around. So how did you persist in this kind of uncertain music industry environment? There is so much change going on. How can you predict exactly where it’s going to go?”

He answered, “Well, we recognize there’s a range of possibilities. We recognize that we’re not really in control of this phenomenon. There are changes going on in the industry that are autonomous. The best we can do as a business is to take notes, pay attention to those changes and try to steer – to the degree we can – in the context of change that we can’t control.” Well, that’s climate adaptation.

One important tool that we use for adaptation is scenario planning. Has anybody used scenario planning? I see two hands. Okay, you guys, what is scenario planning?  

JOURNALIST  Emergency management.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Okay. That’s useful.

JOURNALIST   Anticipation.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  What is a scenario?

JOURNALIST  Simulation of exercises, hypotheses and models.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  So, there are some “what if” cases. It’s basically a structured what-if thinking and its structure. Why scenario planning is useful is that it contemplates more than one way the future can unfold. And that’s certainly climate change.

In general, we know it will be warmer, but we don’t know how much. There’s consequential uncertainty. In most places, we don’t know which way precipitation will go. That’s usually a consequential answer.

So, you can take those two axes of uncertainty – from a little to a lot of warming; and from less to more precipitation. If you cross them, you get a 4 x 4 matrix of four very divergent futures.

We have several approaches for doing that – but in working with the park, we usually collaborate with real climatologists supplying the numbers to create these diversionary plausible futures. Then we ask, “Regarding your management approaches right now  – and your current recovery effort for a planned campground, a dock at a national lake or whatever – how are those designs or approaches going to fare under Scenario 1? Then we jump to Scenario 2 and run it through there. That way we start to build tables of “failed here”, “works there”, blah, blah, blah. And that helps us understand if, for instance, a “business as usual” approach might be robust to all the possibilities. We’ve checked the boxes, done the thinking, and shown the work is good.

We may find that our goal is still tenable, but our means might change. The example we give is trying to maintain a cold-water fishery. Let’s say because of historical impact, we need to do stocking anyway. It may be that in a warmer climate there may be higher mortality, and we have to stock at twice the intensity.

It may be that we need to start thinking about restoring riparian vegetation to shade that stream. It may be that we must start thinking about restoring  hydrology. Those are examples of changes, tactics, or reductions. It may be that we because we’re thinking about a longer time horizon or are in a warmer location, that we realize our goal is not tenable.

And so then, we have what we call a “climate rebuild.” where we adjust our goal and our tactics. We may decide “Okay, we’ll raise a warm-water fishery instead of a cold-water fishery. We’re not going to invest any further in stocking cold-water fish.” This happened with a northeastern Minnesota tribe dependent on brook trout. It is not an NPS example, but it’s one I’m familiar with and learned at the National Adaptation Forum. 

This tribe was dependent on brook trout in a lake as an important source of protein for them. It was also cultural, of course. They studied the brook trout with electro-shocking and watched that population go down. They set their limit for when that was not enough fish and then introduced perch that were on the reservation but not in that body of water. They introduced baby perch and a lot of big perch because they needed a fishery every year, given their circumstances. So that’s an example of a group embracing a new goal and managing the transition.

JOURNALIST   When you do scenario planning, do you put variables into a computer program for this? Do you model a program?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  As with global climate models, the computers are at the front end of producing the future climate information. There are many outfits doing this sort of work. What we bring to folks is 3 different ways of talking about the future. We bring numbers for the quantitative folks, for instance, 1.7 degrees to 2.3 degrees, blah, blah. We bring text. We express the same information textually. Often, an important step might be how many more days over 90 degrees or over 100 degrees will the park experience. Many things tie into visitor well-being as much as natural resources well-being. That’s an obvious and a really important factor.

The final thing we bring are tables with arrows up and down, with the size of the arrow saying how much. In the end, that’s the easiest indicator to use when  you’re considering more than one future – since that’s not easy to do.

When sharing scenario planning, we have a basic, standard talk we share with managers who are busy every day doing complicated, hard logistical stuff – since now we’re asking them to spend a day doing new stuff. It sounds a little intimidating, so we remind folks and ourselves that scenario planning comes out of some hard- core, bottom-line realms: corporations and the military. The major developers of scenario planning were the military in the 1950s and then Shell Oil, ironically. The head of Shell’s scenario planning unit was a Dutch man, Ari Geuse.

The stories are he didn’t like to wear shoes. It seems he was ‘very 60s.” But he really developed scenario planning, thus Shell was successful through the oil shocks of the 70s, and on. It’s ironic that we are using “scenario planning” that the fuel industry advanced to now deal with the consequences of the fossil fuel industry!

JOURNALIST  How big is your department and how many people do what you’re doing?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  A dozen and a half at most, but that’s variable. Three of those folks are communicators. Some folks wear more of a science hat than focus on adaptation in our realm. Some folks say it doesn’t sound like many, but other agencies say, “Wow, that’s a big program.” This is the nature of resources and capacities.

But I think we’re quite effective and vis a vis scenario planning, we have been out ahead of other agencies. Yet in other ways those agencies have been great leaders and partners with us.

CASES PLANNING for GLOBAL WARMING

JOURNALIST   Can you bring to us some specific examples that you’ve encountered –not whether the problem was solved– but just things in flux that would explain this theoretical language at ground level?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior is the most northerly land in Wisconsin near Lake Superior and is composed of a lot of islands. The access is often by boat, so docks are important but produce contentious argument and disagreement about design and placement. For instance, “Should the park get rid of the docks?” The usual sort of stakeholder concerns.

The concern occurs because Lake Superior in the last few years – until recently – had been lower than people could remember and docks weren’t working anymore. Some of those problems caused docks to break; and docks are expensive.

So, they’re trying to replace something like 32 docks over next few years. Don’t quote me on the number – let’s say “a number of docks.” They have dozens. One dock costs $500,000; and it’s supposed to last some decades. So, this is a long-term, consequential investment. How do you do that when the lake just went lower than anybody remembers and we don’t know which way precipitation will go anymore? Well, we take a scenario approach.

So, in early 2015 we did this with the Apostle Islands. We brought our divergent plausible climate futures and translated those into lake levels. We worked with lake-level modelers and translated that information into high- and low-possibility options: 18” up or down – or whatever the numbers were. In this case, the park was inspiring to work with. 

It’s great to work with parks, just to see what they’re doing – and how they often don’t need us. I wouldn’t call “adaptation” rocket science – it’s common sense that stretches your thinking. It showcases your work as logical thinking. It involves working with partners. It’s thinking about the larger landscape. Much of it isn’t very new.

They had a design for docks that dealt with both the lake’s recent lows and where they thought the high might go. But they weren’t sure of future highs and lows. So, we brought in scenarios and spent time with the park digesting and questioning the models. We asked, “How good are your estimates of lake level?”  

The superintendent had a conversation with a climatologist before our process, saying, “I’m using your information to design $60 million of docks to put in in the next few years. The climatologist said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” This was an example of co-production: bringing together your managers and your producers of information. That can be very stimulating and let’s the producers of the information know what hangs on their information.

We look for a process where when you say “Yes, we know this,” and everybody says “Yes, we’re good with that.” In this case, the park design was great. They had put in a lot of thought, and our process validated and confirmed that that was good.

Their other questions were about staffing. They had changes in their visitation seasons and they questions about natural resources. To provide an example involving staffing, I’ll jump to Glacier National Park, where we did study about a year ago on park visitation. We analyzed data across 300+ parks. We found that with 30 years of data, it was clear that peak visitation is when main monthly temperatures are 75 to 78 degrees as an average of day and night. Above or below that, visitation drops off, explaining 69% of visitation to parks. Of course, the other 20, 30% is explained by other things – including school holidays, gas prices, marketing, and other things. 

So we decided to look at individual parks’ stats and extrapolate what it would mean if their July temperatures were 2º to 5º warmer. What if their November wasn’t as cold as it normally was?

With most parks we saw potential expanded visitation that started earlier and ended later. But it could also mean a higher peak. So, Glacier National Park is currently re-planning its transportation and parking. So, they engaged with us and came up with their own models and projects. I think that approach was an extrapolation of recent trends.

They had their own model of where visitation should go and decided to set it up, broadly aligning with our model.  They ran it on more than one scenario: “if it warms 2º, 5º, or whatever we choose.” We combined them all and said, “Great!” We converged on data regarding climate and visitation events and fed that into their planning and events. That’s an example of our contribution with visitor management in July, 2015.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  The title for a journal article by my colleague Nick Fisichelli was a provocative question: “Will Parks Warm Up or Overheat?” We found most parks are cool enough that global warming is likely to provide a potential for greater visitation.

We worked with Acadia National Park in the northeastern U.S. last year and we sort of brought that information to them. They said, “Oh God, we used to close certain roads on Labor Day and Veterans Day. Now it’s Thanksgiving.” Their question was “When does the beginning meet the end?”  They really don’t have a lot of off-season anymore.

So, that resonated with them. They’re seeing changes that were outside of the school holiday season. They were seeing a real expansion in their fall season. That gets to “nuts and bolts” issues. How long do you plow a road?  When do you open a road to begin plowing?  These questions impinge very quickly on this deferred maintenance, because where do you put your resources?

CONFLICTS over SCENARIO PLANNING

JOURNALIST   I believe the Navy wanted to do scenario planning about something impacted by sea level rise, but Congress passed a law prohibiting them from doing that. Do you have restrictions on what you can consider in your scenarios?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  No. We consider real information that’s vetted and validated to synthesize and translate it. Yet, I’ve similarly heard that the State of North Carolina’s legislature mandated that sea level rise projects can only be extrapolations of the past. We hear on the news and read that sea level rise is accelerating according to projections. So we clearly realize that mere extrapolation is going to leave us in trouble.

You know, having come out of Wisconsin DNR where politics are more difficult to flex – John Jarvis was a leader in adaptation there before he became our director here. He talks about climate change, its impacts and adaptation. Read what he says. He spoke of climate central in some good articles this summer. In one, he says that people asked how long he will be sprinkling water on the fuel load under giant sequoias to control fire risk; and was it an in-perpetuity strategy? His answer was no. Basically he said we do need to think potentially about north of Sequoia camps and places where we might help the species. That’s way ahead of the curve and leads the rest of us to think what that means and in what context that process would occur.

I would say it opened a big space – a very supportive space – for us to think about adaptation; and it feels great to be working with that kind of tail wind.

A Santa Cruz fire plume seen over the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Yosemite.

SPECIES STUCK DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

JOURNALIST  Are there plants or animals in this park – or other places – that are at risk in the high elevations that provide no further place to go?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  The Arctic is the one example I’ve heard about. 

JOE MEYER  We don’t know. Throughout the west, people are studying pikas. The science is a mixed bag. But yes, they are a high-elevation critters and there is much concern that they’ll be pushed out without an escape route. We need the science to help us with that type of scenario.

JOURNALIST   There is also a type of white pine growing around the tree line. That is basically the last tree, a type of white pine growing around the tree line. It’s basically the last tree you see before you enter up into the alpine zone. It’s having difficulty through the west – in the northern Rockies in particular. It’s not doing as poorly here as it in the northern Rockies but it’s one of those species right at the edge that we’re looking at and worried about.

Another indicator of climate change is the five-needle pine. We started intensive monitoring of it probably about 10 years ago. The goal is to track it over time and see how it does. One thing about science that many don’t realize is that it takes time. A three-year study is just that, a three-year study. It’s why looking at the great scientific study that was done by Grinnell in the “19-teens,” and now looking at it 100 years later, gives us a good picture of the changes.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  That’s a unique situation.

JOURNALIST   Yes. It’s one of those opportunities that happens here at Yosemite that very few people have elsewhere. Here we have the resources – largely through the Yosemite Conservancy – to replicate that study 100 years later.

WHITE SANDS N. M. and WATER

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  The park I’m working with now – while not a solution; but hopefully, a solution in progress – is White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico. This is a non-traditional, climate-change-focus park in a bright part of the world. What’s the problem?

The problem is that, okay, they have dunes that only persist where the water table is very high. Normally you don’t find such dunes because they blow away. In the past few years, White Sands has had some droughts. They showed me an aerial photo with a white plume of dust lifting off from White Sands and blowing all the way to Oklahoma. Their concern about the persistence of a geological feature is why the park was created in the first place.

They call themselves the “Glaciers of the South.” We are in the process of bringing scenarios into probably a very challenging public process in terms of who’s pumping ground water – farmers, ranchers, municipalities, White Sands Missile Range and the National Park. It’s a complex mix. Everybody wants data. That’s the common interest and a common meeting point. So, we’ll start with the numbers and then see where that gets us in terms of assessing probabilities.

RESILIENCE-ADAPTATION-RESISTENCE-NORMAL

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Most of our cases are more open-ended, where we grapple with big problems and then do the thinking to liberate action. Much of the adaptation looks much like traditional conservation. The Merced River work reminded me of work on the Quinault River in Olympic National Park. They introduced complexity and worked it out. It’s often hard to tell whether our projects are adaptation projects or traditional conservation being re-labeled. In some ways it doesn’t matter, as long as you can use logic and it fits in to work for climate projects to achieve current goals.

Here’s a question – What does resilience mean to you just in plain language?

JOURNALIST   The ability to bounce back.

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  So you keep what you had?  Okay: a focus of traditional conservation is to put the pieces back together so that the system can take a licking and keep on ticking, right?

And the challenge for us now is we see change around us that we’re not going to reverse. Some things we’re talking about as these pikas start declining, are whether we can arrest that process. So, does this word “resilience” help us in that case?

We’ve wrestled with that because the common understanding is it bounces back, and we keep what we had. But in climate change adaptation it gets very murky.

So if there is an Executive Branch order, it calls on the nation to adapt with support from the Chief Executive and defines all the terms for us. The definition of resilience is to keep what you have while it allows for change and transformation. But with a definition that broad, we sell our stakeholders on resilience and what they get is unrecognizable change. That is dishonesty in advertising.

On the other hand, if we just work with what we call a  bi-legalistic way – we say, “Well the Executive Branch definition includes adapting.” “Adapt” refers to the full spectrum: from working to keep what you have and resisting change all the way to embracing and working with change to get the best outcome.

So, if you’re talking to somebody about adaptation and they use that word, I’d encourage you to ask how they define the word. If I use the word it has a positive connotation and means working to preserve something in some way. But it’s useful to be more specific. I’m a critic of the term; but whether you embrace it or not, people often say “Let’s drill down a little further.” That’s a good starting point but not an ending point.

JOURNALIST   What word would you use instead?

GREGOR SCHUURMAN  Resist. If you’re going to resist change, resist. You may do that by “enhancing ecological resilience,” which is a well-understood term. But if we’re going to carry out an ecological transformation, I’d rather call that “directing change” or “managing change.”

For example. we have an effort to analyze adaptation in the context of policy and law. We call it The Gnarly Act – “gnarly” because you get questions like this: “I’m seeing this impact, should I resist the change by doing something artificial or extreme? Should I embrace the change and allow for my system to change in a way that’s hard to call “natural” since it’s driven by climate change which isn’t natural? Our policy calls for us to restore and maintain what is natural.”

So, what is natural anymore, when climate change touches every acre?  And is “natural” a useful standard? We’ve accepted it’s challenging. John Jarvis said in a 2012 memo that “normal” is a difficult standard and increasingly difficult to discern, given the global impact we create.

And if not, we’re now trying to decide what our reference point would be. There’s this phrase, “ecological integrity.” Can ecological integrity be a moving target or a dynamic concept? There’s a lot of thinking about that.

Sequoia and Kings Parks asked a gnarly question. They say we have 2,300 high-elevation wetlands, or wet meadows; and woody species are encroaching there. What do we do? They’ve asked, “Should we be diverting streams to keep our wetlands wet in a warming climate? Should we keep fighting this change?  Should we be knocking back this encroachment?” In places where we’re failing, should we try to relocate sensitive, vulnerable frogs, or other species?

Those are all good questions, but it comes down to values. That’s a process that is bigger than adaptation. We began with saying, “Let’s first just flush out the full spectrum of options. Let’s make sure we are flexing our management paradigm and not focusing on resisting change. Let’s put all options out there, with no preferences attached. Then, let’s screen every one of those options through our policy and laws and then label each according to whether it is ambiguous, okay or totally and clearly prohibited. That’s what we did. 

In Sequoia and Kings Canyon, in terms of directing change, they asked, “If our high-elevation wetland is desiccating, eroding, and depositing sediment in habitats of sensitive species downstream, what is the natural thing? What are we supposed to do there?” Wouldn’t it be better to accept that this will no longer be a meadow? Shouldn’t we accept it’s turning into a riparian system and working on some riparian actions? You couldn’t call it “restoration” – but maybe “development” instead. To prevent that sedimentation, we’ll accept that while this is no longer a meadow, we are reducing harm downstream.

That’s a difficult choice – but it’s an option. In general, our policy is restricted with such options. We’re involved in a big effort – now at a higher level in the agency – to expand our thinking from the ground to help inform high-level thinking so it’s really connected..

So, we’ve got both top-down and bottom-up approaches going on, meeting and overlapping in the Park Service right now, pushing us to think about these gnarly issues in a policy context. 

JOURNALIST  On that gnarly note, we’ll drive up the road to Glacier Point and continue this conversation there. Thank you Greg!  

Posted by NWNL on November 20, 2025.
Transcription edited and condensed for clarity by Alison M. Jones.

All images © Alison M. Jones, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.