The Ecological Effects of a Rapidly Warming Climate
Case Study: Kenai Wilderness: Unimpaired? Untrammeled?
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020
Presenter: John Morton, Ph.D., Supervisory Biologist at Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (recently retired), Vice President of the Board of Alaska Wildlife Alliance
The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge is two million acres of boreal forest on the Kenai Peninsula in southcentral Alaska, where climate is warming two times the rate of the Lower 48. Two-thirds of the refuge was designated Kenai Wilderness by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. The Wilderness Act defines Kenai Wilderness for us: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This all makes sense when we consider that early pioneers might have left behind a now-decaying trapper’s log cabin, the remnants of a mining sluice, or even a new forest that regenerates in the aftermath of an escaped campfire. But how do we interpret what Wilderness is (or should be) in a world in which the climate itself is driven by carbon and methane emissions being pumped into the atmosphere by human engineering? The climate is what ultimately determines the distribution (and redistribution) of plants and animals, fire return intervals, insect outbreaks, whether precipitation falls as snow or rain or at all, and the hydrologic regimes that sustain returning salmon.
Learning Objectives:
1) To appreciate how anthropogenic climate change can have cascading and often dramatic effects on all aspects of ecological systems.
2) To challenge our notions of “What is untrammeled?” and “What is natural?”
3) To raise the question, “Are there conditions in which we might choose to intervene in Wilderness?”
Bio: John recently retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after 32 years as a wildlife biologist in Alaska, California, Guam, Maryland and Wisconsin. He was most recently the supervisory biologist at Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, where he focused on novel approaches to monitoring biodiversity and adapting to a rapidly warming climate. He represented the USFWS in the GAO’s investigation of climate change impacts on Federal lands (2006) and on DOI’s Climate Change Task Force (2007). He helped develop the USFWS’s Rising to the Urgent Challenge: Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change and the interagency National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy (2011). He continues to work with two interagency groups on new ways of thinking about climate adaptation, and serves on boards of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Alaska Institute for Climate and Energy.
See John’s presentation here or scroll below.
