Prairie-pothole wetlands provide the critical habitat necessary for supporting North American migratory waterfowl populations. However, climate and land-use change threaten the sustainability of these wetland ecosystems. Very few experiments and analyses have been designed to investigate the relative impacts of climate and land-use change drivers, as well as the antagonistic or synergistic interactions among these drivers on ecosystem processes. Prairie-pothole wetland water budgets are highly dependent on atmospheric inputs and especially surface runoff, which makes them especially susceptible to changes in climate and land use. Here, we present the history of prairie-pothole climate and land-use change research and address the following research questions: 1) What are the relative effects of climate and land-use change on the sustainability of prairie-pothole wetlands? and 2) Do the effects of climate and land-use change interact differently under different climatic conditions? To address these research questions, we modeled 25 wetland basins and measured the response of the lowest wetland in the watershed to wetland drainage and climate variability. We found that during an extremely wet period (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000) wetland drainage decreased the time at which the lowest wetland reached its spill point by four years, resulting in 10 times the amount of water spilling out of the watershed towards local stream networks. By quantifying the relative effects of both climate and land-use drivers on wetland ecosystems our findings can help managers cope with uncertainties about flooding risks and provide insight into how to manage wetlands to restore functionality.Sustainability 2019, 11, 6581 2 of 20 and biological (e.g., vegetation and aquatic macroinvertebrate communities) variables of interest in areas where vulnerable wetlands that have been well documented as a "disappearing ecosystem" [4].The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) covers approximately 777,000 km 2 of the North American midcontinent (Figure 1). Over half of the historical wetlands in the PPR have been drained, and conversion of upland areas to crops has altered wetland functioning and the ecosystem services provided by wetlands [5]. Millions of small, glacially derived wetlands that provide critical habitat for migratory waterfowl [5] and other wetland-dependent species [6,7] occur in the PPR, making it a continentally significant region for biodiversity [8]. The wetlands of the PPR also provide additional ecosystem services such as floodwater storage, sediment reduction, water-quality improvement [9], and carbon sequestration [10]. The need to tease apart the complexity caused by interactions between climate and land-use change drivers and how they affect biodiversity, in general, has been recently established as a pressing research priority for ecosystem scientists and land managers [2]. Understanding the relative impacts of climate and land-use change on wetland hydrology is critical for developing land-management strategies...
Grasslands, and the depressional wetlands that exist throughout them, are endangered ecosystems that face both climate and land‐use change pressures. Tens of millions of dollars are invested annually to manage the existing fragments of these ecosystems to serve as critical breeding habitat for migratory birds. The North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) contains millions of depressional wetlands that produce between 50% and 80% of the continent’s waterfowl population. Previous modeling efforts suggested that climate change would result in a shift of suitable waterfowl breeding habitat from the central to the southeast portion of the PPR, an area where over half of the depressional wetlands have been drained. The implications of these projections suggest a massive investment in wetland restoration in the southeastern PPR would be needed to sustain waterfowl populations at harvestable levels. We revisited these modeled results indicating how future climate may impact the distribution of waterfowl‐breeding habitat using up‐to‐date climate model projections and a newly developed model for simulating prairie‐pothole wetland hydrology. We also presented changes to the number of “May ponds,” a metric used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to estimate waterfowl breeding populations and establish harvest regulations. Based on the output of 32 climate models and two emission scenarios, we found no evidence that the distribution of May ponds would shift in the future. However, our results projected a 12% decrease to 1% increase in May pond numbers when comparing the most recent climate period (1989–2018) to the end of the 21st century (2070–2099). When combined, our results suggest areas in the PPR that currently support the highest densities of intact wetland basins, and thus support the largest numbers of breeding‐duck pairs, will likely also be the places most critical to maintaining continental waterfowl populations in an uncertain future.
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