Anticipating responses to climate change and planning for resilience in California's freshwater ecosystems

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Power, Mary E.; Chandra, Sudeep; Gleick, Peter; Dietrich, William E.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE); University of Nevada Reno; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-8836
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310075121
• 发表日期: 2024-08-06
• 关键词: lake tahoe; river; impacts; algal; fish; population; RESOURCES; increases; nutrients; habitats

摘要

As human- caused climate changes accelerate, California will experience hydrologic and temperature conditions different than any encountered in recorded history. How will these changes affect the state's freshwater ecosystems? Rivers, lakes, and wetlands are managed as a water resource, but they also support a complex web of life, ranging from bacteria, fungi, and algae to macrophytes, woody plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In much of the state, native freshwater organisms already struggle to survive massive water diversions and dams, deteriorating water quality, extensive land cover modification for agriculture and urban development, and invasions of exotic species. In the face of climate change, we need to expand efforts to recover degraded ecosystems and to protect the resilience, health, and viability of existing ecosystems. For this, more process- based understanding of river, lake, and wetlands ecosystems is needed to forecast how systems will respond to future climate change and to our interventions. This will require 1) expanding our ability to model mechanistically how freshwater biota and ecosystems respond to environmental change; 2) hypothesis- driven monitoring and field studies; 3) education and training to build research, practitioner, stewardship, and policy capabilities; and 4) developing tools and policies for building resilient ecosystems. Agoals- driven, hypothesis- informed collaboration among tribes, state (and federal) agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academicians, and consultants is needed to accomplish these goals and to advance the skills and knowledge of the future workforce of practitioners, regulators, and researchers who must live with the climate changes that are already upon us and will intensify.