5.12 Climate Change
al. 2007) . Ground temperatures that are higher than normal winter seasonal ranges are associated with milder winters and may cause earlier onset of spring conditions. Tere is evidence that plants that have evolved to emerge annually based on persistent soil tem- peratures are now blooming as many as 10 days earlier than previously documented. Many wildlife species will be afected by a disconnect between availability of food resources and young produced during the spring. Birds that migrate earlier in response to warming tem- peratures may experience greater competition for food and cover resources when there are disconnects between occurrence and availability. Climate-change-driven warming could expand the northern ranges for many invasive insect species (Vose et al. 2014) . Climate change could also indirectly afect insect populations through impacts on natural enemies, important insect symbionts, host physiology, and host range distributions. Future warmer winter temperatures could remove existing range barriers for some native species. Tis could result in spread into places where hosts are cur- rently abundant and result in competition between native and nonnative insect species. 5.12.3 Precipitation Changes—Anticipated Impacts Climate change is expected to directly impact water resources through changes to the amount, form (fog, rain, snow, ice), and timing of precipitation (Marion et al. 2014) . Tese changes will infuence the quantity of basefow and stormfow and the frequency of groundwater recharge and fooding (Marion et al. 2014; Karl et al. 2009) . Changes in precipitation amount or storm intensity can afect soil erosion potential by changing the runof amount, the kinetic energy of rainfall, or the vegetation cover that resists erosion (Marion et al. 2014) . Models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show changes in precipitation will strongly infuence future variability in wet and dry summer patterns over the southeastern United States (Li et al. 2011) . Te science of predicting precipitation changes for North Carolina is still young and no clear trends are evident (NCSCO n.d.; Wootten et al. 2014) . Recent changes in precipitation in some parts of the state may be related to decadal oscillation (Sayemuzzamana and Jha 2014) . Some cli- mate change models indicate that total amounts of precipitation may not change much, but the intensity and duration of events, both storms and droughts, will increase. Tis could mean that the extreme or infrequent conditions may be a more infuential abiotic factor than these habitats and wildlife communities are accustomed to. Tere are more than 100 years of weather and climate observation records from several locations in the southeast, but there are typically fewer than 5 years of observation records of ecosystems (Wootten et al. 2014) . Tere is much uncertainty in understanding the relationship between climate change and ecological response because of the lack of overlapping data sets.
727
2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online