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Climate Change and Federal Lands: The Florida Keys
A report from the Government Accounting Office (GAO), an arm of the U.S. Congress, states that climate change is increasingly impacting federal lands. Nevertheless, federal management agencies have not made addressing climate change a priority.
The report is based on a workshop presented by the GAO in collaboration with the National Academies’ Board on Atmospheric and Climate Change and attended by scientists and federal resource managers. The workshop centered on four units, selected as representative of the types of ecosystems that predominate on federal lands: Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (coasts and oceans), Chugach National Forest in south-central Alaska (forests), Glacier National Park in Montana (fresh waters), and the Bureau of Land Managements Kingman Field Office in northwestern Arizona (grasslands and shrub lands).
The Florida unit is the site of a marine ecosystem, which includes primary coral reef systems. It also has within its boundaries four National Wildlife Refuges, which protect globally imperiled terrestrial habitat. (The refuges are managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rather than by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the Sanctuary as a whole.) Old Growth in the East names two of the refuges: Crocodile Lake in the Upper Keys for some of the best old high (tall) hardwood hammock and Key Deer in the Lower Keys for old-growth pine rockland and tropical hardwood hammock. Key Deer, the GAO reports, is home to twenty-two federally listed endangered and threatened species and is the only habitat in the world for five of them.
As has been widely publicized, warming has already contributed to the degradation of coral reefs, in part through coral bleaching, a stress response in which the coral expel their algae. Threats to terrestrial ecosystems include a projected rise in sea level and the already-occurring increase in number and intensity of hurricanes. Both phenomena can cause saltwater to intrude on the land and overwhelm the sources of freshwater that sustain wildlife. An increase in salinity can change where fire occurs and the distribution of species. In the Everglades, which is closely linked to the ecosystem of the Marine Sanctuary, "the ocean front is already encroaching further inland, pushing the salt content higher in border areas and traditionally fresh water areas."
Resource managers have only limited guidance as to whether and how to address climate change, and they do not have enough site-specific information to make plans to meet future changes. The GAO recommends that the agencies develop guidance to remedy these lacks.
Sources:
Davis, Mary Byrd. Old Growth in the East: A Survey. Online-edition. 2003-2007. Available through this web site.
Government Accounting Office. Agencies Should Develop Guidance for Addressing the Effects on Federal Land and Water Resources. Report GAO-07-863. August 2007. Available on the Web at www.gao.gov.
Heilprin, John, Associated Press. "Warming Affecting Federal Lands." Lexington Herald, September 8, 2007.
--posted September 7, 2007