This project is funded for three years starting September 1, 2006 by the The National Institute for Climatic Change Research (NICCR) ,which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER). The goal of NICCR is to mobilize university researchers, from all regions of the country, in support of the climatic change research objectives of DOE/BER. The project brings together experts from a variety of backgrounds in climate and climate change modeling, ecosystem research, past vegetation change, inventory and monitoring, and ecosystem modeling. This unique integration of interdisciplinary researchers provides a great potential to better understand and predict the impacts of climate change on natural systems. We feel it is impossible to project changes in the geographic boundaries of U.S. terrestrial ecosystems or biomes without understanding how the species that form them will respond. Our regional modeling effort includes all the dynamic components important to controlling a species distribution; it is a key step for moving modeling forward. SIMPPLLE models and other landscape process models have been developed for several other areas in the U.S. but many of them have not yet incorporated GCM output. Our proposal will improve modeling for climate change impacts by merging biogeographical/habitat models with dynamic vegetation modeling and by merging climate modeling with ecosystem modeling.
   For this modeling effort 26 dominant plant species occurring along the 3,000 m elevation gradient from the low deserts of the Grand Canyon to the alpine tundra of the San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona to represent the regional study area have been selected.
   The study hypothesizes future changes in climate will cause dominant plant species to independently shift distributions, resulting in a reshuffling of plant associations. Also many future disturbance processes influenced by climate such as bark beetle outbreaks, drought mortality, wildfire frequency, and exotic species spread, can be simulated using climate model results.