🎙️Assessing Landscape Conditions: A Key Aspect of Landscape Conservation Design, with Pat Comer

🌎 Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast

Pat Comer, Chief Ecologist (retired) with NatureServe shares insights on conducting landscape assessments and their application to landscape conservation design (LCD). The discussion provides practical advice for stakeholders interested in LCD—highlighting landscape assessments as a crucial component in the design process. Tune into this enlightening conversation packed with expert insights perfect for anyone passionate about sustaining nature through thoughtful planning, design, and collective action!

Key Points Discussed:

• Assessing Landscape Conditions: The conversation begins by breaking down assessment into two categories: current conditions (risks and vulnerabilities) and plausible future conditions (scenario planning).

• Iterative Process: LCD is highlighted as an iterative process where assessing landscape conditions can occur at various stages. However, it typically takes place after stakeholders convene but before spatial prioritization or strategic planning.

• Technical Nature of Assessments: Emphasis is placed on the highly technical nature of assessment work. Such tasks are often compiled or completed by experts, like Pat Comer and NatureServe.

• Paper: Documenting at-risk status of terrestrial ecosystems in temperate and tropical North America (2022): Pat discusses this paper.

• Habitat Climate Change Vulnerability Index Applied to Major Vegetation Types of the Western Interior United States (2019): Pat discusses this paper.

• Climate Change Adaptation Zones for Terrestrial Ecosystems—A Demonstration with Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands in the USA (2023): Pat discusses this paper.

Episode Highlights:

• NatureServe Overview:

  Pat outlines NatureServe’s mission to compile standardized data sets that answer foundational ecological questions—what species/ecosystems exist? Where are they located? How are they doing? What changes do they face? What actions do we need to take?

• Multidisciplinary Challenges:

  The discussion touches upon challenges when compiling multidisciplinary information essential for holistic ecosystem understanding. It emphasizes collaboration among scientists from different fields to agree upon the standards necessary before engaging broader community stakeholders.

• Social-Ecological Integration:

  Reflecting on progress made towards integrating social science with ecological data, Pat shares optimism about expanding methodologies that encompass diverse perspectives beyond just ecological expertise—a critical aspect needed for comprehensive landscape planning efforts.

Resources:

• Comer, P., and Seddon, E. (2023). Climate Change Adaptation Zones for Terrestrial Ecosystems—A Demonstration with Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands in the USA​

• Comer, P., Hak, J., and Seddon, E. (2022). Documenting at-risk status of terrestrial ecosystems in temperate and tropical North America.​

• Comer et al., (2019). Habitat Climate Change Vulnerability Index Applied to Major Vegetation Types of the Western Interior United States​

• ​NatureServe​

• ​IUCN Red List of Ecosystems

For More Info:

• …or participation inquiries, visit www.designingnatureshalf.com, or write us at: info@designingnatureshalf.com

Credits:

• Research / Writing / Editing / Production by Rob Campellone & Tom Miewald;

• Cover Art / Logo by Lucas Ghilardi;

• Intro / Outro Voiceover by Tom Askin;

• Music Composed & Performed by Aleksey Chistilin via Pixabay

Transcription:

Intro / Outro: Mind Matter Media presents Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast, where discussions center around the most current and innovative approaches to landscape conservation and design. This is the show for stakeholders who want to adapt to the climate crisis, halt biodiversity loss, and change the world by designing sustainable and resilient landscapes through collaborative conservation action.

Rob: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode six of Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I'm your one and only host this week, Rob Campellone. Tom's in Amsterdam on a work-related trip and can't join us for today's discussion. We have a really great show ahead with a very special guest, retired Chief Ecologist for NatureServe, Pat Comer. Pat and I will discuss an essential attribute of landscape conservation design: assessing landscape conditions. When we think about assessing conditions, we typically break that discussion down into current conditions, often described in terms of risk and vulnerabilities and plausible future conditions, which brings us into the realm of scenario planning. Because LCD is an iterative process, assessing landscape conditions can be done and is often done before or at various times during the design process. But generally, because it's easier for us to think in linear terms, we think of it as occurring at some point after landscape stakeholders have convened and agreed to work together through a design process before any spatial prioritization or strategic planning is conducted. Logically, that makes sense, right? Because you want spatial design and strategy design work to be informed by a thorough understanding of the landscape, which is, of course, science. I don't think we will get down into the weeds today and talk about integrated landscape assessments. But that's a realm of landscape assessment work that I personally am very intrigued by and which our last guest, Dr. Ronald McCormick, touched on in our previous discussion about complex systems theory and the need to understand the socioecological aspects of a system, which is what integrated landscape assessments try to do, given the highly technical nature of assessment work. Regardless of whether we're talking about integrated landscape assessments or not, the work is typically compiled by or conducted by parties like Pat Comer and NatureServe. Still, they could also be done by one or more of the landscape partners if they have the ability to do that work. It's not just a matter of turning the knobs and pulling the levers, or, in this day and age, banging on the keyboard, but equally as important, having the ability to communicate the results to other specialists and decision-makers. So, with that as a foundation for how landscape assessments fit into the larger realm of landscape conservation design, Pat and I will talk a little bit about the IUCN's red list of ecosystems, which he and a few of his colleagues published a paper on in 2022. We'll also talk about another paper Pat and his colleagues published in 2019 about a climate vulnerability assessment that was applied to major vegetation types in the western United States. And finally, we'll discuss yet a third paper that Pat and one of his colleagues, Emily Sedin, published last year on applying vulnerability assessment results to map out zones for adaptation. And we'll provide links to all those papers in the pod notes so folks can easily find them. But first, Pat's bio. Since completing studies in forest and landscape ecology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Pat has worked for over 35 years on applied research in natural resources management and biodiversity conservation. Most recently, Pat served for over 20 years as the chief ecologist at Nature Serve, retiring in early 2023. There, he led a team of ecologists focused on multiscale ecosystem mapping and assessment, often with federal agencies and the NatureServe network of natural heritage programs. Prior to nature serve, Pat was a senior ecologist and conservation planner with the Nature Conservancy, first in Michigan and the Great Lakes region and later in western North America. There, he developed planning methods and supported 25 teams in completing systematic conservation plans within and across ecoregions in North and South America. As a long-standing member of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management, Pat piloted red list assessments for terrestrial ecosystems across North America and supports identifying key biodiversity areas. With the key biodiversity areas partnership among over 160 scientific publications, Pat published a framework for assessing climate change vulnerability for ecosystems and has advanced his analysis across North America. I want to welcome my friend and colleague Pat Comer to today's podcast. It's good to have you here, Pat. Did I miss anything from your bio that you want to add or highlight?

Pat Comer: Hi Rob. Yeah, thanks for the intro. I thought that was great. You covered it quite well, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and with all of your listeners here. I've started listening to this podcast series and enjoyed it very much so far. I think it's really very much needed for these kinds of conversations to be had. So, yes, I'm ready to go.

Rob: Think first; congratulations are in order, in part for not only having a very accomplished career but, more importantly, for your recent retirement. So, congratulations. Welcome to the free world. Hope you're out there enjoying yourself, Pat, spending time with family and friends and experiencing wonderful landscapes, if not here in the United States, around the world.

Pat Comer: Yes, I have been really enjoying this past year after retiring from nature serve, but then been keeping my hand in things, working on some papers and publishing some papers. And I'm now back in the United States. And so, we'll see how things develop here this year. Thanks again, though.

Rob: Why don't we start today's discussion with a quick introduction to your career as a conservation planner at the Nature Conservancy, then transition to your time at NatureServe and your association with IUCN, and then maybe dig a little deeper into some of your papers and their findings. How's that sound?

Pat Comer: Briefly, my training was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, mainly in landscape and forest ecology. I actually did a stint. I wanted to get out of academia a bit and join the Peace Corps. I was down in Costa Rica back in the 80s, did some agroforestry and reforestation work before I actually joined the Nature Conservancy, and I was with Michigan Natural Features inventory in Michigan. It's really part of the network of natural heritage programs that exist in all 50 states and on some of the tribes as well as in Canadian provinces. And so that was really my original home with the Nature Conservancy and doing sort of scientific inventory, field inventory work there. Then, with TNC, I got engaged very much in applying sort of systematically developed data, biodiversity-related data, and conservation-related data to conservation planning. And it was really conservation planning at sort of more local landscape scales, sort of the individual sites and how we think through what are conditions on a particular site and how do we prioritize actions on a site. But also, this was back in the, I'd say, the mid-1990s, the Nature Conservancy used to do the planning, large landscape planning first at a statewide level. So, we would do an annual, we called it a scorecard, where we would get together and assess what we learned in the past year. What are priority places to do, focus on conservation. And it was at that time, like I say, this is the mid-90s when within the Nature Conservancy at least, and many other partners, advances in landscape ecology, conservation biology, were really pushing us to broader and broader landscapes. And that's where the idea of really doing systematic planning within ecoregions really came about. And so, as I was working in the Great Lakes region first, and then I moved west, I was the western regional ecologist for the Nature Conservancy. A lot of my job related to developing methods for really what we now call landscape conservation design or systematic conservation planning, but at the scale of eco regions. And so that was a lot of the effort. The Nature Conservancy was pursuing with many partners. I was on ten different teams, spanning geographies from Alaska down to South America in Paraguay and the Chaco across all the western ecoregions. So, in the United States, there are about 60, I'd say 68, ecoregions within the lower 48 states. And each of those ecoregions was a couple of yearlong planning process of organizing information, assessing conditions on the ground, and then doing spatial landscape design, as you were alluding to earlier. So, that was a lot of my focus at TNC. And then with the development of nature serve, which really spun out of the science division of the Nature Conservancy around 20 years ago, I moved over to really focus on that development of systematic, consistent, standardized conservation data and science. So, a lot of my work has been focused on how we can engage with larger partners, many federal agencies, or national governments in Latin America, for example, to develop information that is suitable and applicable to conservation planning at broad scales, all the way down to finer scales.

Rob: Let me follow up with a question regarding your time at TNC. Can you speak to how the work that you were doing at that period in time kind of fit into the evolving field of conservation planning and ecological assessment, how you expanded on those early conservation planning and assessment processes and helped to evolve those science processes, or just kind of generally, what do you feel as if your contribution was in that work that you were doing?

Pat Comer: Yeah, at that time, we were really trying to figure out the process. They had been working in sort of large ecoregion-scale landscape planning in different places, like in Australia. Work was happening in South Africa, for example, and across Europe. What we were tasked with doing was really testing the evaluation of information that we had been developing over recent decades, really up to that point, and finding out that there were real needs for mapping distributions of biodiversity, both species and ecosystems. So, I focused a lot on that. That actually led to federal investments in ecosystem classification and mapping. So, part of the impetus of that was recognizing in order to do large landscape planning across jurisdictions. So, this is, like I say, the first time, at least in my experience, we were really moving across state borders and trying to knit together how people had been thinking about ecosystems at a state level, but we really needed a comprehensive view that was not only across states but across national borders. And so, mapping distributions was a major focus of that effort and assessing the condition. This is where systematic methods really understand how our ecosystems function; how healthy are they locally and range-wide? This is where we were tackling. This is some of the most difficult and challenging kinds of work that we were doing at that time to really develop those kinds of methods so that they would be suitable, so we could answer those kinds of basic questions of how the ecosystem is doing, how are species doing, how are species populations doing across a given ecoregion that spans different political jurisdictions. So that was a major focus of what we were doing then. And it was also the point at which some of these priorities setting spatial design tools started to get used. So today, you'll hear people utilizing tools like Marxan or other kinds of spatial optimization tools. Where should we conserve lands and waters to meet various goals and objectives? Those kinds of software tools were actually coming on the scene. And so, we were really some of the first in the Americas to really utilize those kinds of tools in a systematic landscape level priority setting process.

Rob: So, from TNC, you transitioned to NatureServe, where you eventually retired as chief ecologist after 21 years of service. Can you introduce our listeners to NatureServe, the organization's mission, the services they provide, the relationship between NatureServe and the network of state natural heritage programs, and maybe the planning you were doing during your time with that organization?

Pat Comer: Sure. So, yeah, as I alluded to, NatureServe actually spun out of the Nature Conservancy. I spent, whatever, eleven or so years as part of the Conservancy staff, and we were part of the science division of the Nature Conservancy. Providing that scientific expertise and organization of data for use by the Nature Conservancy and their partners. And it became clear around 1990 819 99 that, in fact, we were working with everyone else beyond the Nature Conservancy proper very much a lot of the time. And so, it seemed appropriate at that time to spin-off. It has a separate non-government organization. It serves as sort of an umbrella for the network of natural heritage programs, which goes back to about 50 years ago when the first natural heritage programs were established in individual states. And so those serve, as you can think of them, as a biodiversity inventory of each state. When I was in the state of Michigan, as a program ecologist there, my job was really to know the ecology and the ecosystems, the natural communities of the state of Michigan. That is replicated with botanists, zoologists, and other experts, as well as now many spatial analysts and data managers within every state. And again, as I alluded to the TVA, for example, has a member program. Each Canadian province has a member program. The tribes, several tribes have member programs or some strong affiliation. These programs individually were established by the Nature Conservancy, but the intent was they would find a home in their particular jurisdiction away from the conservancy. So nearly all now are either in state governments, they tend to be in the state wildlife agency, or they're in state universities. And so that's very much the case today. So, NatureServe then serves as a bit of an umbrella to communicate and link together all of these disparate programs that really are housed in different agencies across the United States and in Canada. And so, the database systems for pooling data across jurisdictions is something that NatureServe does. You can go to the natureserve.org website, and you can see people use NatureServe Explorer, for example, every day to get information about species and ecosystem types. And so, it's part of that consolidation, organization, and establishment and refinement of standards for systematic conservation data. And so, we call this kind of foundational ecology data that we bring to the collaborations with different stakeholders if we're doing planning or assessment at different scales. So, I tend to characterize nature service. We're trying to answer a handful of basic questions. I call them the What is it? Questions, the where is it questions, the how's it going? How's it changing? And finally, what should we do about it? So, what do I mean by that? So, what is it? That means taxonomy of species, classification, and description of ecosystem types. So that's where we systematically organize this information. It's a continual moving target. That is, our knowledge keeps expanding. And so that's a continuous process of maintaining taxonomies and advancing classifications for ecosystems and community types. Where is it about inventory and mapping? And so, we engage deeply in field inventories; for example, the individual natural heritage programs, as I alluded to, do fieldwork; a good chunk of every year they're out in the field documenting locations, especially for particularly rare species and their habitats, and where are they located and what are their conditions? As well as mapping and engagement with state, federal, local, but also often federal agencies on mapping. And so, I've been engaged since the beginning with, for example, the Landfire effort as the interagency program of the federal government with partners to systematically map terrestrial ecosystems with the intent of understanding their dynamics and helping to manage fire regimes, which in several your prior podcasts, there's already been some discussion about that. How we model and understand the issues associated with wildfire in the temperate context of North America is a big issue. And so, we've been engaged providing that sort of expertise in community or ecological system classification so that those become the targets for mapping wall to wall in the, so that's the kind of where is it question, how's it going? Is that assessing the condition or health of ecosystems, either locally or when I'm standing on the ground? How do I really understand what I'm looking at? Am I looking at a healthy example of a habitat or community type, and how do I document that? Similarly, we need to look at that range-wide and organize information so we can really assess how things are doing from a range-wide standpoint. And I'll talk about that more under the example of the red List of ecosystems. How is it changing? It is where either change in sort of overall extent or changes in quality or condition or health are taking place. We need to understand those trends. Similarly, this is where we tackle issues of climate-induced change, in some cases, the transformation of ecosystems. And so, methods and data associated with that come into play there. And then, like I say, finally, what should we do about it? We provide this sort of systematically developed information to all different partners who are engaged in different types of landscape assessment, priority setting, sort of place-based action, and policy-based actions. Get informed by the data that is developed through NatureServe, its member programs, and its partners on an ongoing basis. It's kind of the bread and butter of what this sort of program and NatureServe does.

Rob: Pat, you spoke about the multidisciplinary nature of ecosystem assessments. Do you have any thoughts as to the challenges that are associated with compiling that information from different disciplines and kind of packaging it in such a way that makes sense, that provides more of a holistic perspective of the ecosystem?

Pat Comer: Yes. I mean, it is, though, a major challenge to get on the same page with things like taxonomy and classification, with mapping and inventory. These are the components that I view as their inputs into collaborative planning. And so, like I say, a lot of what we have been doing focuses on the collaboration of scientists in a multidisciplinary sense of how do we communicate with each other, how do we work together to organize standard information? And part of that relates to, can we agree upon data standards? And some of those things translate into how we manage information. You have to have databases that can actually accept data from multiple different sources and bring them together into a standardized format. So much of that sort of scientific activity brings people together within a given field. Let's say they're ecologists who are focused on wetlands, and we have to agree on how we define different types of wetlands. What's the key data that needs to be brought together? So, we describe them, map them, and assess their condition. This is a scientific process that spans people of different expertise and different geographies. They're longstanding challenges. I've had the good fortune of kind of working sort of north, south, east and west in the Americas. And so, I've benefitted from being exposed to different ecosystems. But it's very easy. Many people may spend their entire career within a relatively focused geography. So they're just not exposed to different types of, let's say, species or ecosystem types that don't fall anywhere near their jurisdiction. And so, there's a lot of sorts of translation and getting onto a common understanding of how we establish scientific standards. And like I say, this is actually before we even get into that conversation, which is the broader social aspect of how we do landscape conservation design, how we engage people in the people who live on the landscape, and what are our collective priorities. This is more the scientific pieces of collaboration I'm mainly referring to because this has been largely the focus of what NatureServe has been working with.

Rob: The design literature is increasingly talking about the need for us to look at the socioecological system as an integrated whole. And I spoke a little bit about integrated landscape assessments in the introduction, but I don't know how much of that is actually being tested or tried. I'm not sure how much researchers, planners, and designers are trying to incorporate not only ecological data but also social data into a more holistic landscape understanding.

Pat Comer: Yeah, I would say what I've observed through my career has been one of. I remember, for example, in graduate school, folks who were focused on social impact analysis and the beginnings of really, social science as a field within a natural resource kind of school as it was. I was at what was then called the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. I would say through the earlier years, I was alluding to the nature conservancy. Yeah, I would say 90% of our focus was on the ecological science side of things. But what I've definitely observed, I would say, in the last 20 years is very much an expansion of and a work with more social scientists and more ways and developing methods for collaboration that really are more encompassing of different perspectives beyond the purely ecological expertise that we would have brought to the table previously. So, I'm generally quite optimistic about the expansion of that. I think it's still happening. It's still early. I don't think we're at the level that we have been for ecological science and development of data standards in the social science realm, as it's applicable to, say, conservation and natural resource planning and management. But I definitely have seen a lot of progress in that direction. And I think I see it from the non-government organization perspective. We learned a heck of a lot by engaging in Latin America because conservation within Latin America is much more of a social-ecological process. And so, there was a lot of deeper experience, I'm thinking, going back 25 to 30 years, of people engaging in collaborative planning that was very much acknowledging and engaging cultural diversity and cultural perspectives in the process. And so, you know, partly because I have a little bit of background working across Latin America, that we in North America had lots to learn in that realm. But, like I say, I think there's much more to do to sort of further integrate that knowledge and that expertise of how we think about the social aspects of landscape planning. How do we systematize aspects of organizing information in the same way that we have been doing for many decades in the ecological realm?

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Rob: I guess I'd like to shift at this point, Pat, and focus on a few of your papers. Why don't we start with your 2021 paper in conservation science and practice titled Documenting at-risk status of terrestrial ecosystems in temperate and tropical North America? You and your colleagues applied four IUCN Red List of ecosystem criteria to 655 terrestrial ecosystems in North America to gauge the probability of range-wide collapse. The findings are quite alarming, but can you speak to the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems and tell us a little bit about the IUCN?

Pat Comer: Just for listeners' background, the International Union for Conservation of Nature was established in a post-World War II realm. The headquarters is in Europe, but there are actually members of IUCN non-government organizations as well as governments. The US government is a member of IUCN, as are other NGOs. Like NatureServe, IUCN has been around focusing on sort of global standards for understanding biodiversity and conservation all this time. Many people are familiar with the red list of threatened species that was established by IUCN, I believe over 40 years ago now. It's the common sort of global way of determining if species are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. These are categories, standard categories, near threatened, and least concerned. Now, I should say NatureServe has had a parallel sort of program or framework for doing that sort of status assessment. It's one of those ways we answer the question of how biodiversity is doing. And that is, people may be familiar with global ranks of relative imperilment status. NatureServe also, for the past 40 years or so, has actually been engaged in this kind of assessment and organization of information around this. But it became clear; I would say, 15 years ago or so, that we really needed a more rigorous framework for assessing ecosystem types in the same way, or in a parallel way that we were thinking about individual species and establishing a status assessment. To back up, when we think about this from a range-wide standpoint, we should ask, why do we do this? Well, part of this is getting at we're trying to get at a relative risk of loss. That's what an assessment, a status assessment, is really about. And what it does as it translates into landscape conservation is, first off, what it tells us. It gives us a relative sense of urgency of action. If we're talking about something that's critically endangered, we really have few opportunities to conserve that species or ecosystem type, and so we urgently need to take action. Whereas something, if it scores as, let's say, least concern, we actually have many different options in terms of conserving that type of species or ecosystem over the long term. And so, first and foremost, as I say, a status assessment tells us a lot about the urgency of taking conservation action. And so, it was about like, say, 15 years or so ago. I've been a member of what's called the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. Through that commission, experts from around the world got together, started reviewing how people had approached it in different countries, and then started to organize and structure a global standard for assessing ecosystem types that, again, would serve as that parallel to the red list of threatened species. And so, just at a very high level, I want to talk about, there's some of these aspects we get at the measurement of trends over time, over several different time frames, over the past 200 years or the past 50 years or the next 50 years, or changes to ecosystems in extent or changes in condition or that health, looking at both abiotic as well as biotic ecosystem components. And so, these are the sorts of analyses that are required for us to get a handle on what's the status of different ecosystems. Now, we have been very fortunate that, especially in North America, we have focused a lot on ecosystem classification, especially, well, say, terrestrial ecosystems. What do I mean by that? Upland types, forests, grasslands, shrublands, as well as wetland types and riparian or floodplain kinds of communities. There has been much work in freshwater and coastal marine communities, but there's been much more work in the terrestrial realm. And so that's actually what we focused on for this initial application of the IUCN criteria in North America. But to touch on this in terms of mapping and mapping distributions, it's only been the last 20 years or so that the advancement of satellite imagery or other forms of remotely sensed data has been really available to allow us to map ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems, at levels of detail and reliability that were far beyond where we were, like I say, just a couple of decades ago. So, increasingly, you see the organization of data and the use of tools for machine learning. Increasingly, you hear people using AI. Well, yes. AI is a part of actually making maps, of actually organizing observations of different types of ecosystems that we have classified and described, millions of different observations, combining that with different forms of satellite, remotely sensed data to actually map their distributions, both their historic potential extent as well as where they are today. And it allows us, this is like I say, something we've only been able to do in really recent years. And so, we're fortunate to be in this position to work with, let's say, 655 different upland and wetland ecosystems in North America. This analysis focused on temperate Canada, so southern Canada, all the way down through Central America and the Caribbean. So those are 655 different types of, like I say, forests, grasslands, shrublands, different types of wetlands, coastal community types. Those were the focus of this analysis when we got into that assessment of trends. So, some of this is change in extent. How much have we lost? We've converted a lot of North America for agricultural land uses, urban land uses, and other kinds of land uses. That makes up and explains a lot about the status of terrestrial ecosystems in North America. There have also been more recent trends. So that is, we want to understand, are some parts of the landscape really experiencing land conversion just over the past 50 years? So that's another form of measurement that is essential for getting a status. And then finally, we're actually trying to look out over the sort of a 50-year window, looking into the future, and see what that informs us about the nature of trends. And again, what we're about is getting at a sense of relative risk of loss, ecosystem type by ecosystem type. So, when we get at condition, this is where some of those, the previous podcasts, and Ron McCormick's reference to wildfire modeling come into play. The data from ecological site groups or Landfire, that create these, we call these state and transition models. What are the succession and disturbance patterns for each of these types of ecosystems? We have a lot of well-documented understanding of all these different ecosystem types in terms of their natural disturbance regimes so that we can compare that against the current distribution and structures we observe on the landscape. And we can now see and quantify where our effects of fire suppression, for example, come into play, where effects of invasive species altering fire regimes come into play. So, these are really important measurements that tell us a lot about what is the current status, what's the current condition, and the health of ecosystem types. And so, we are very fortunate in the United States, at the very least, that we have this wealth of data that we could bring to the table, apply these different criteria that we've established under the IUCN framework, and consistently come up with a score. And so, overall, with our North American study, what we could see is about 33% of those 655 types fall into one of these categories of vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. Now, some of these major patterns we have known about quite well, as I alluded to, we say the Midwest is kind of the breadbasket of the world. Well, our prairies, our tall grass prairies in particular, have paid the price for that. So, some of this is not a big surprise. Earlier in the 20th century, there was a lot of wetland conversion and drainage of wetlands, mainly for agricultural land uses. And so many wetland types have declined in their status due to outright conversion and drainage of wetlands. Our eastern forests, where much of the eastern United States was converted for agriculture, but we're actually seeing a bounce back in many different types of eastern forests, that there is a regrowth of forests with urbanization that has been happening. So, these are long-term trends that we could see, but we could see in a much more precise way now that we can apply these criteria with the current kind of data. The other major finding of this analysis, which I find very intriguing, we think about landscape conservation design, is approximately 30% of the current land area of this whole study area in temperate to tropical North America currently supports ecosystem types that fall under this vulnerable to critically endangered ecosystem status under the red list. And so, it gives us a lot of a sense of places where, again, there's an urgent need for ecological restoration in different parts of the North American landscape. And so, we know what they are. We know where they are today based on this more updated kind of mapping capabilities. And we also know a lot about how they have become really degraded and altered. And so, we have an accumulated set of information that is very informative towards thinking about strategic landscape conservation design that will help us restore and recover many ecosystem types that we know are, at the very least, vulnerable to complete loss.

Rob: So that's a great segue then into your next paper that I'd like to talk about. And that's your 2019 paper titled Habitat Climate Change Vulnerability Index, applied to major vegetation types of the western interior United States. I'll cut you loose here, Pat; run with it.

Pat Comer: Sure. So similar to that and sort of parallel to thinking about the red list of ecosystems where there was an existing assessment protocol for species. But we felt that we needed to develop something that really dealt with the complexities of multiple species interacting with their environment in some different form. You need to think about the entity differently when you want to do an assessment. We felt the same way about climate change that previously nature served. Many other folks had developed what we call vulnerability assessment protocols for species, and those had been on-the-ground people utilizing them. But it was around 2010 or so when we started this process. We actually had support from the Fish and Wildlife Service to get ourselves going on this, and we organized expertise and then developed a framework that parallels the assessments for species. But like I say, you're going from, we would say, is really od ecology for the biology and ecology of individual species and how they interact with their environment to syne ecology. How do multiple species in different environmental settings actually interact? And these are what we say are communities. So, you have to think about different components differently. But we settled on the basic framework that is common in many climate change vulnerability assessments, where there's some measure of climate change exposure. That is, the climate is changing. And so, what's its effect, its direct effect on the community, the ecosystem type at hand? And then we also compared that against measures we call resilience measures. And these have two different pieces to them. Some of them are what we call ecological conditions or sensitivity measures, and those very much relate to the other kinds of things we use for status assessment. The ecological condition or health of a particular ecosystem at a given place is relevant in a climate change context. The other is what we call the adaptive capacity of a community or ecosystem type to climate change. So, given the same kind of increment of climate exposure, there are different resilience measures that we're going to bring to the table. So adaptive capacity we think of in a couple of different ways that are really new. We haven't actually, as ecologists, been thinking about these things in the same way climate change has forced us to think a little differently. So, I would characterize these as abiotic ways of thinking of adaptive capacity. And if you think about, let's say, vegetation on the landscape if it occurs on a very flat plane, and so just the topography, where particular types of communities and ecosystem types exist for the same increment of climate change, you got to think about the need for species. Individual species that make up that community are likely to need to move a greater distance for the same increment of change, as opposed to if something occurs in a very rugged landscape; there's likely to be many microclimates within that rugged landscape. Therefore, individual species likely will be able to move, so to speak, within and stay within their sort of climate envelope than they would in a flatter landscape. So that's an aspect of adaptive capacity that's purely abiotic. It's where the communities sit in the landscape. The other is biotic. That is, what are the species and the different roles that species play within communities? This is where it sort of forces us to think about the functional roles that species play, let's say, nitrogen-fixing plants or others that serve different kinds of functional, purely functional roles. It's not so much about whether it is a rare species; is it a trusted species from a Fish and Wildlife Service perspective? No. What's the functional role that a species is playing in a given community type. Because we know with climate change, we'll lose individual species. We don't necessarily know how well, we don't know very well which ones we'll lose, but we want to know if there's sort of, let's call it a functional redundancy, that is, there are multiple or many nitrogen fixers, or there are just a few nitrogen fixers. If, in fact, there's only one nitrogen fixer, you would start to say, well, maybe we have a keystone species. I really want to understand the relative climate change vulnerability of that species because it's going to tell me a lot about the vulnerability of this overall ecosystem. So, these are some aspects we bring together for climate exposure. We're looking at temperature, precipitation, kinds of variables, seasonality variables, and how they have changed since basically the mid-20th century as a functional, practical baseline. And so, we want to know practical things. Is it getting warmer and drier? Is it getting warmer and wetter? What are the projections that we can actually utilize from the accumulating and advancing, rapidly advancing climate modeling field? And so, we want to understand that we only look out the next several decades because you look at error ranges of models as you look out to, let's say, the end of the 21st century or a 2100 projection, the error bounds are really quite wide. And so, all we tend to do with a vulnerability assessment when we measure exposure is look out to mainly the mid-21st century and compare that against roughly the mid-20th century to understand the magnitude of change amongst different climate variables. And so, what we've been able to do so far, we did that initial analysis. The Bureau of Land Management supported it. We did an analysis of over 50 major types that occurred on BLM lands in the western United States. And then since then, there's been another 50 or so types have also been assessed across the United States. So, there's a lot of progress regarding the actual then initial assessment. And what we really see is one, the geography of vulnerability varies across space and across time. That is, what I mean by across space is that, let's say, we have a different type of sagebrush. Well, different types of sagebrush. They can occur over hundreds, thousands of square miles. And so maybe on the north end or the east end or the south end, you might be scoring much more significant vulnerability than you might in another part of the range of a type of sagebrush type. And so, there's just diversity and variation across the distribution of individual types is something that we see coming out of this sort of analysis. But first, what we see is we want to track this over time. And so, what we could sort of see right now, we started to do analysis, apply our criteria to all different types with just sort of emergent patterns of climate change with data climate models up through today. Our first analysis was looking at climate change as of 2014 and then looking at those as you go out towards the mid-century. The basic finding and way to think about this is that the climate is changing. It's changing at a highly variable rate from place to place. But overall, are applying our same criteria, most types scored in sort of the moderate vulnerability range. Today. You would say that today, based on the degree of actual climate exposure. And much of that moderate vulnerability comes from the fact that our resilience scores, that is, we have degraded and altered ecosystems across North America to varying degrees. And that explains a lot of the current vulnerability. But then as you move out and you look out towards the mid-century, then you see more types, many types, a larger proportion of types start to score in the high to very high vulnerability range. And that is really just the compounding effect of increasing climate exposure combined with those measures of condition, or we call them overall resilience measures. And so, our bottom line from this kind of analysis is we make investments today to restore or maintain ecosystem health. These are important responses to climate change vulnerability. So, we don't need to hesitate too much about doing maintenance and restoration of ecosystem health and condition, addressing many of the issues of fragmentation or invasive species or alteration to those natural disturbance regimes. That's a good investment today as an initial hedge against, hopefully reducing climate change vulnerability over upcoming decades. And that we can see, and we can see in places greater and greater climate exposure is beginning to occur, and is projected to occur using the latest climate modeling and climate science, that we can begin to think more and more about. What is the task that we are going to have if we can maintain and restore healthy ecosystems? Undoubtedly, in many places, they're going to continue to change. They're going to be under greater stress and climate stress, and we need to understand the nature of that stress so that we can respond in the most effective ways.

Rob: I think we have time for one more paper. Pat, I'd like to hear your thoughts about your 2023 paper titled Climate Change Adaptation Zones for Terrestrial Ecosystems. You used NatureServe’s Habitat Climate Change Vulnerability Index as part of that study. I don't know if you want to focus on the index or speak to the overall studies, but I'll leave that up to you. So, take it away.

Pat Comer: Yeah, I'll focus very much on the follow-on, and we call this sort of, think of its adaptation zones. And that is, we do vulnerability assessments. But the reason we do this is because we really want to inform what we do about the nature of vulnerabilities that we're able to document and clarify. Fortunately, there's been great thinking that you're certainly aware of about how we begin to cope with and think about adaptation. And there's different frameworks coming online to help us organize our thinking about what is the appropriate response to a changing climate and climate stress. So, the purpose of this analysis was one we just focused on pinion juniper Woodlands as more of just a documenting, an illustration of a process of how we would organize this information that comes out of the vulnerability assessment to turn into something quite practical for planners and managers. And when I think of this again, we're really fortunate to have mapped things because if there's one aspect of something I could give someone that is practical, if I could tell you, I can give you a map that gives you some good suggestions about the management emphasis for adaptation that is received eagerly by many planners, many managers, if they really appreciate something as concrete as a map, that gives them some insight. And so, when we think about those responses, various publications are associated with thinking of adaptation responses. But I'll boil it down into sort of three generalized categories. There, in fact, are more categories. But let's think of it this way: resistance versus sort of resilience-based strategies versus transformation-based strategies. And so, what do we mean by these kinds of adaptation responses? A resistance strategy might be, let's take a coastal ecosystem, and you're anticipating a bit of sea level rise or change in coastal dynamics. You might harden the shoreline. You're really kind of resisting the change is what you're doing with some measures there, resilience for that same shoreline. We might be saying, well, let's restore some of the coastal wetlands so that we can be resilient to the changing sea level rise and coastal dynamics and coastal disturbances versus a transformation kind of strategy in that same shoreline. We might be saying we really need to construct a whole new shoreline to cope with the magnitude of change that we can foresee. So, the question becomes, what kinds of strategies are appropriate? Where would we actually implement these kinds of strategies? Actually, a very important thing is the temporal dimension when we don't want to rush into implementing something based on an estimate of change that really is not likely to take place for several decades, perhaps. And so, we need to think about the timing of this, too. So, what we were doing with this analysis and these examples is really looking at the patterns of vulnerability for each of the pinion juniper woodland types. And again, there are exposure measures; there're those resilience measures that are all quite useful to then think in a practical, map-based standpoint, to say, okay, can I actually fit, generally speaking, into more of a resistance end of the spectrum or a resilience end of the spectrum? Or, gosh, do we need to be thinking about transformation-based strategies soon, like within the next decade or so? So first it's a little bit of a categorization of the different kinds of adaptation strategies, a whole family of strategies we might pursue. And then we utilize the actual measurements we used in the vulnerability assessment. Those things are mainly based on what I call the resilience measures that got at fragmentation; they got at invasive species, they got at alterations to natural disturbance regimes. And those then inform a bit more about the nature of adaptation work that is needed within a given geography. And so, what we were doing is looking out, looking out into the upcoming decades across different penny juniper woodlands. And we could say by categorizing these different zones for each type, just a handful of different mapped zones for each type. That gives an initial input to planners and managers as to this is what we're probably up against in terms of managing penny juniper woodlands within a given jurisdiction. So, our results initially were saying by the mid-21st century, it's anywhere between three to 23% of the combined area of these types within the United States was categorized as either directed transformation or autonomous transformation. This is digging into the details a little more, but there will be transformation there. We're either going to sort of connect the landscape and let species move around themselves, or more directed transformation. We're going to need to take some directed actions. But transformation is likely to be happening within this time frame. Just 10% of the combined area of these types is really categorized into the more passive resistance strategy suggested. That is kind of just business as usual. You're doing fine. You're kind of in a very typically very isolated area. And the degree of climate stress seems to be manageable without needing to change your current approach to management too much. That just applied to 10% of the landscape looking out over upcoming decades. So, this is some of what we were working on how do we organize information so it could be informative to planners and managers. They could start to think about budget allocations. We spend an awful lot of money just on public lands managing vegetation and habitats. And so, the ways that we can organize our information to be more efficient and targeted and focused as what is the right response that will give us the maximum benefit from the standpoint of actually conserving biodiversity under a changing climate, this is an increasingly urgent thing for us to do.

Rob: Well, Pat, I'm afraid we're running out of time, but it's been great having you on as a guest, and it's been a great discussion. Thank you so much. Do you have any parting thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners before you go?

Pat Comer: Throughout much of my career, I've been able to, and I've had the real pleasure of working with public land managers and land use planners like you, Rob. And I have to say, I want to shout out to the public land managers and planners. They have a tough job. The task of really engaging people and engaging a lot of information in planning processes is no small task. And they are people to be admired because as things have gotten more complex and, in many cases, more controversial, more polarized, it's just a very difficult job to corral people to get onto a common framework. But it's absolutely essential. Conservation is really complex. It's really challenging. It really should not be polarizing or bipartisan by any means. It's all about our collective future. So we all really need to take responsibility and work together. And so that's all my parting thoughts for today, and I want to say thanks again for the opportunity. This has been great. I've been enjoying your podcast and I'll continue to engage on these.

Rob: Okay, well, thanks to our guest, Pat Comer, and thank you, our listeners, for tuning in this week. Join us every two weeks for another informative episode of Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I've been your host, Rob Campellone.

Intro / Outro: Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast is researched, written, edited, and produced by Rob Campellone and Tom Miewald. Lucas Gallardi created the Designing Nature's Half cover art and logo design. Tom Askin is the voice behind the intro and outro, and the music was written and performed by composer Alexei Cistlin via Pixabay. Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast is a proud member of Mind Matter Media, a startup multimedia network whose mission is to change the world by designing sustainable and resilient landscapes for people, planet, and prosperity.

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