Current and Projected Future Distribution of Plant Community Types for the Southern Seward Peninsula, Alaska

• Main Authors: Konduri, Venkata, Breen, Amy, Hargrove, William, Hoffman, Forrest, Salmon, Verity, Iversen, Colleen, Ganguly, Auroop, Kumar, Jitendra
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: 54 Environmental Sciences; Seward Peninsula; Alaska
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1884818; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1884818; https://doi.org/10.5440/1884818

Landscape scale maps of plant community distribution at 5 m resolution were developed for southern Seward Peninsula. A Random Forest based environmental niche model was developed using topographic and climate data sets. Models were trained for the 2010-2019 period and applied to develop plant community distributions for contemporary (2010-2019) period. Trained model was applied to project the plant community distributions under future climate. Using downscaled projections for RCP8.5 scenario from five climate models (CCSM4, GFDL-CM3, GISS-E2-R, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MRI-CGCM3) and multi-model mean, a six member ensemble of plant community distribution were developed for current decade (2010-2019) and for future decades (2020-2029, 2030-2039, 2040-2049, 2050-2059).