Geospatial Decision Support Tools for Coastal Resource Management: Vulnerability Maps Characterizing Regional Climate Variability and Change Impacts

PI: Dr. Timothy Nyerges, Professor, Department of Geography, Affiliate Professor, Center for Water and Watershed Studies, University of Washington, Dr. Dawn Wright, Professor, Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University & Dr. Robert Aguirre, Independent Scholar, Robert W. Aguirre, PLLC

Project Period: 08/01/2007 - 7/31/2009

Abstract:
Marine and coastal resources are under increasing near to long-term pressures as summarized in the US Ocean Commission Report, the Pew Ocean Reports, and synthesized in the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation Report. Extant pressures (e.g. stressors such as pollution, harvesting, habitat destruction, invasive species, land and resource use, extreme natural events) on coastal resources are increasing every day. To those extant pressures, scientists now add climate variability and change drivers that are expected to exacerbate the impacts on coastal resources. Scavia and colleagues produced a summary of the coastal and marine resources sector review of the potential drivers and impacts from climate variability and change. Their analysis considered several key climate change drivers including: sea level change; alterations in precipitation patterns and subsequent delivery of freshwater, nutrients, and sediment; increased ocean temperature; alterations in circulation patterns; changes in frequency and intensity of coastal storms; and increased levels of atmospheric CO2. From those drivers come impacts on shorelines, estuaries, coastal wetlands, coral reefs, and ocean margin ecosystems. Consequently, climate variability and climate change can be considered additional hazards that should be added to the current slate of hazards already under consideration for stressing Coasts. However, the nature of the cumulative impacts and the resulting cumulative effects are not well understood. Additionally, knowledge about climate variability and change drivers and the resulting individual and cumulative impacts on coastal resources is not integrated with decision support technologies. That circumstance makes it extremely difficult for coastal resource managers to take advantage of what is known in order to plan and improve coastal resource management and mitigate hazards. This project integrates across those gaps in knowledge for the Oregon Coastal areas.

In a first task, the research team will work with decision managers and community stakeholders to elicit and elucidate regional decision task requirements associated with coastal resource (e.g., land use and estuarine ecosystem) management and climate change impacts, including resilience to coastal hazards, by introducing climate information and climate variability/change scenarios. The project will make use of the first two steps of the Australia Greenhouse Office's risk management approach for assessing regional climate change impacts. Those two steps essentially provide sufficient information for generating and evaluating regional vulnerability maps. As such, the first two steps constitute a "vulnerability assessment", rather than a full risk assessment, which is in line with the size of the project.

As a second task, we will develop and implement a data integration strategy for combining coastal resource and hazard information within the context of climate variability and change scenarios to support requirements for extending use of the WWW-enabled Oregon Coastal Atlas.

The Atlas was developed by Co-PI Wright and her colleagues at Oregon Ocean-Coastal Management Program and Ecotrust as part of a National Science Foundation Digital Government grant. The Atlas contains a variety of data files for download and for presentation display with the open source Minnesota MapServer. At the current time the Atlas contains 3385 spatial data files covering a very broad-based set of themes for download or to make maps on-line. However, no climate impacts data, per se, exists as yet in the atlas. This project will develop that data and integrate it as part of the data file archive made available to scientists, decision managers, community stakeholders, and the general public.

As a third task, the team will use the decision requirements results of task 1 with the integrated data of task 2 to create a vulnerability mapping capability for the Oregon Coastal Atlas to enhance existing geographic information systems (GIS) capabilities. We will conduct literature and software systems reviews and synthesize information about vulnerability map decision support tools that can support coastal resource management. The team will pay particular attention to data management, analysis and visualization tools that address uncertainty in decision making for climate change impacts. In addition, we will look to identify opportunities for the use of participatory decision support tools in vulnerability mapping.

Bringing the results together into a fourth task, the team will use a decision simulation approach to gather input from stakeholders and evaluate how the capabilities foster climate impact literacy and transparency. The multimedia decision simulations will form the foundation of our evaluation effort in attempts to convey to diverse parties - elected officials, decision managers and stakeholder publics - the challenges involved with incorporating information about climate variability and change impacts into coastal resource management. The decision simulations will evaluate how the vulnerability mapping capabilities are interpreted by diverse parties. The evaluation will use an experimental research design conducted in a face-to-face workshop setting. We will use a pre-test and post-test strategy to examine the effectiveness of vulnerability maps and tables for depicting climate impacts information. Morning and afternoon sessions will be used to assess different aspects of that climate change information.

Finally, in a fifth task, the team will reflect on how aspects of our collaborative process could be repeated in other places, as supported by the content management tools we used to manage the artifacts developed in the project. Members of the research team have been involved in large multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research work over the past ten years - not all described in this project description. Despite the myriad of researchers working on large projects, specialized information technology tools to support collaborative projects are still in an emerging stage. Based on a synthesized view of the best practices from our previous efforts, the research team will establish a web platform to support collaboration management using open source Plone, Wiki or Drupal content management tools. The team will design for a web platform that will meet the needs for this project activity, but could be useful to other researchers as well.

The overall project results can be used by decision managers, community stakeholders, and scientists to better understand how to incorporate regional climate information, climate variability, and climate change impacts into decision support processes to improve coastal resource management decision making.