Visualizing Ecological Drought Impacts, Vulnerabilities, and Drivers to Inform Deliberate Decision-Making

Droughts of the 21st century are characterized by hotter temperatures, greater spatial extent, and longer duration. This situation leads to ecological impacts from drought that ripple through human communities, which depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services.

This research project, led by Conservation Science Partners and funded by NIDIS through the Fiscal Year 2020 Coping with Drought Research Competition, aimed to provide a foundation of understanding ecological drought vulnerability to support participatory planning processes that integrate ecological drought. The team worked to produce integrated science products to improve our understanding of how drought indices, landscape context, ecological condition, and human water use relate to ecological thresholds. This will allow natural resource managers and drought planners to better anticipate ecological impacts and downstream effects on human communities. 

For more information:

• View the research profile for this project.
• Read the journal article, "A flexible data-driven approach to co-producing drought vulnerability assessments."
• View the data release, "Simulated streamflow and stream temperature in the Donner und Blitzen River Basin, southeastern Oregon, using the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS)."