TANYA: OK.
Next up, we have the pleasure of welcoming Andrew Shirk
from University of Washington Climate Impacts Group.
Let's just get you to your point in the slides.
There we are.
And then you can escape out.
Yeah.
And you can escape out to get to your demo.
ANDREW SHIRK: OK.
Thanks.
Thanks, Tanya.
All right.
So by virtue of you all being in this room,
I don't need to tell you this story.
I think the thing that is underappreciated
is the fact that climate change has not
been the main driver of the extinction crisis
that we find ourselves in.
It's really a legacy of the past several hundred years
of land use management, the way we made decisions
on the ground, that have led to these numbers.
Going forward, though, as the pace of climate change
accelerates over the century, I think
climate change is going to be a much bigger driver
of the extinction rates.
And these curves might get even steeper and these numbers more
dramatic.
So I think this could be an underestimate
of the magnitude of the impacts of climate change.
I think it's really the intersection between climate
change and the expanding human footprint that
is going to play out in some of the worst ways for wildlife
and biodiversity so this is just a projection
under certain assumptions of dispersal for mammals, birds,
and amphibians done by Josh Lawler's lab
at the University of Washington.
My point here is that, with climate change, many species,
many populations are going to be compelled
to move potentially very long distances over short times.
And in this modern landscape full of dispersal barriers
and urbanization, highways and such, many species
are going to find it challenging to make
these types of movements over the time and space constraints
that are present.
And the way conservation is practiced today,
it's going to be challenging for the status quo
to really meet this challenge.
Conservation really isn't organized
at the spatial and temporal scales to meet the challenge.
So this is a potential range shift for the sagebrush biome
in Eastern Washington.
And if you think about it, no one land manager
owns the full extent of this problem.
There's hundreds of land managers in this region.
A few of the bigger ones have conservation plans
that are thinking about the problem at this scale,
but they're not really talking to each other
in any sort of coordinated way.
They mean well, and they have great plans, potentially,
for within their own management areas.
But if they don't talk to each other
and make their plans line up at their boundaries,
then we're not going to protect a connected network of habitats
that can facilitate these types of range shifts.
So then you end up making local land use decisions that
don't have this bigger regional perspective in mind,
and you miss opportunities.
Another downside of the current status quo
is that it's expensive to make data and models to inform
these types of plans, and so they're
done rarely and rarely updated.
And so these plans often become rapidly outdated.
And the discussions of many of the newer plans
have the climate change dimensions incorporated
into them but it's done in sort of a qualitative way often,
and it's hard to make firm decisions
on the ground around land use for these things.
So in Cascadia, this region of Washington
and southern British Columbia, we've
organized this Cascadia Partner Forum.
I wish I had more time to tell you about the Partner Forum.
There's a link there at the bottom,
CascadiaPartnerForum.org.
We're trying to do this conservation differently.
We're trying to be more coordinated
and dynamic and practice conservation at larger scales,
work together across boundaries.
So this partnership formed in 2012.
And the first thing we did was not build a tool.
We have been engaging these folks, these practitioners,
these land managers.
It's all levels of government, from federal to state to local,
tribes, NGOs, local groups.
We've had a dialogue for seven years now.
And it's an ongoing process that never ends.
But we have a very good relationship
throughout the group, across the group.
We have a really good understanding of their data
needs and the species and biomes that they're
willing to work across their boundaries for conservation
for.
So I feel like that was a really important step.
And now, just in the last year and a half,
we're building a tool that fills the data gaps and provides them
information to make land use decisions that can support
this type of conservation.
So the tool is not finished.
It's a work in progress.
But this is the scope, the domain of the tool.
It's to monitor habitat and habitat connectivity
for the species and biomes that this audience has articulated
that they're willing to work across their boundaries on.
It monitors the human footprint over time,
both natural and anthropogenic disturbances.
And then it projects future rain shifts
for species and biomes of interest given climate change
scenarios, like the sagebrush biome shift decency in the GIF.
And then it maps a connected network of habitats and biomes
for each one of these targets.
And within those networks it assesses
risks and opportunities for improving
the functioning of the network.
And really, the punch line is that all of this information
gets distilled down into a single surface that's
a blueprint for conservation that we all can--
that's the mechanism for coordination in the title
there.
So if we're all working off the same blueprint that
spans all of our boundaries, we can make decisions
that line up at our borders.
And by collectively developing this together,
it's the blueprint for conservation in the region.
The dynamic part comes from Earth Engine
and the other Google Cloud tech.
All of the modeling and data ingestion steps
are done on a schedule in the cloud automatically.
And they're linked to dynamic data sources.
The Earth Engine catalog is a big part of it,
but there's other data sources too, like open street maps
that this connects to.
And the scale part comes from just the scale at which we're
practicing making these relationships
and practicing conversation encompasses
the full scope of the problem.
So we're trying to involve literally all decision-makers
in these regions.
All right.
So this is a prototype.
We're just getting ready to try to fly this thing in Cascadia.
It's early days.
I'm going to try to give you a brief demo of this.
But I want to make a point here, too, is that this is obviously
a global problem, and we're building
this from the ground up in Cascadia
so that it can be portable.
We can take this approach, at least
the tool part of the approach, and replicate it
in other regions.
So we hope to extend our area beyond Cascadia soon.
OK.
So I escape out of this.
And I go to the--
I don't even see it.
Thank you.
Oh, it's over there.
OK.
We can go with that.
All right.
TANYA: Sorry.
Is that OK?
ANDREW SHIRK: Yeah.
That's all right.
So this region of Cascadia--
sorry-- doesn't even have a land cover
map that spans the border.
And so we've been highly constrained
by working across our boundaries just
from lack of a continuous land cover model.
So this tool annually produces new land cover models
every year.
It uses the great land trender approach in Earth Engine
to model forest disturbance across the region
so we can attribute that forest disturbances to timber harvest
or wildfire, disease, or all sorts of things.
And these sorts of disturbances and land
cover classes and the open street map's data
that it ingests all go into a model that
quantifies the human footprint in the landscape.
And we can attribute this human footprint--
it integrates a lot of things-- agriculture, energy,
infrastructure, population density, transportation,
and urban areas.
So you can explore the attribution
of the human impact.
And then it projects--
we've only done this for the shrub steppe
biome in the region but--
I can't get that to scroll.
There we go.
I'm going to play an animation of the projected biome
shift of the shrub steppe biome through this entry here.
So I don't if you can see that slider.
Is it going in?
Yeah.
So this is the Columbia Basin in Eastern Washington.
And the core of the Columbia Basin
is becoming too arid for shrub steppe-- oh, thanks.
The core is becoming too arid for shrub steppe species,
and so this is projecting upward in elevation expansion
of the shrub steppe biome.
So there's lots of layers in here.
The only other one I really want to show
is, we can model dispersal out from these areas
of suitable shrub steppe habitat.
It takes a second to load.
Oh, I didn't pray to the demo gods, so maybe it won't load.
There it goes.
So I'm just going to zoom into a little area
to show you some detail here.
[TIMER BEEPING]
I'll go into my Q&A time just a little bit,
just to finish this.
So this is a simulation.
It's a stochastic simulation of shrub steppe species trying
to move and track their changing habitat over time
as it shifts across the landscape.
You can see it slowly, every decade,
shifting across this landscape.
And the tool will eventually identify
discontinuities, breaks, like this interstate 90 crosses
here.
And it will identify areas that would
improve the functioning of the network
if you did conservation.
Like for a highway, for example, you
would want to build a crossing structure.
Where would you build a crossing structure
to get the most bang for your buck?
And you can look at the landscape integrity layer.
Turn this off.
So this looks like a pretty good place
to build a crossing structure.
So what's actually going on in that area?
So the landscape-- oh, wow.
So we have low landscape integrity.
There's a big human footprint here.
What are these features on the landscape that might be acting
as barriers to migration?
If we zoom into the satellite view, we can see interstate 90,
and we can see this highway.
And we can see there's actually--
if you zoom in even further--
we put a wind farm here about 5, 10 years ago.
And wind farms are great.
We need wind farms.
But with this type of information,
maybe we could have put it in a place that
really didn't block a future corridor in the future.
So it's this type of on-the-ground action
that the tool is really designed to inform.
All right.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
TANYA: I think we've got time for one question.
Anybody?
AUDIENCE: So the Canadian government
doesn't have this land cover maps and things
that you needed out of the box?
ANDREW SHIRK: They do.
They just don't jive at the border,
and their land cover classes are a little different.
So it's hard to get them to match up.
And they're not up to date.
I mean, even the USGS in the United States,
they just released the 2016 land cover.
But wildfire is rewriting the map
for conservation of species.
The lynx folks in Washington had wildfires the last three years
that have completely changed the map for conservation
of that species.
So the point of this is to make it more frequent updates,
annual updates, so that we can not just
update the inputs into the models
but update the conservation plan itself every year so it stays
dynamic and adapts to change.
Thanks.
TANYA: Cool.
Thank you very much, Andrew.