​Climate Change Research

​​Climate change is a global issue with profound implications at local and state levels. SFBBO’s interdisciplinary approach to climate change research seeks to understand how climate changes will interact with two of the other biggest stressors affect ecosystems at a global scale—changes in land use and water use—to ultimately affect both ecosystems and people. 

Leading the Way in California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment

Picture

SFBBO staff are lead-authoring the Central Coast Regional Report for California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, in conjunction with the Langridge Lab at U.C. Santa Cruz. The current assessment is the fifth such assessment in a comprehensive initiative led by State of California to summarize the best available climate science across five sectors—climate trends and projections, key impacts and events like wildfire and storm surges, and the potential impacts of these changes on ecosystems, human communities, and built infrastructure. The report for the Central Coast region will cover a six-county area between Santa Cruz and northern Ventura Counties, including key agricultural regions like the Salinas Valley and iconic natural landscapes like the Big Sur Coast.

​In addition to coordinating overall report development, SFBBO has a special emphasis on development of the Natural Lands section of the report. Our staff are coordinating dozens of researchers across the state to synthesize research on how climate change is affecting the region’s diverse natural ecosystems—forests, riparian areas and wetlands, grasslands, shrublands, coasts and beaches, tidal estuaries, kelp forests, and fisheries. These habitats are critical for biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, water filtration, and nutrient cycling.
​A key component of the Fifth Assessment is community engagement, ensuring that the voices of those most affected by climate change are heard. The central goal of the assessment is to compile information on regional climate vulnerabilities and promising new climate adaptation approaches into a single, easy-to-understand report. We are undertaking active outreach to local communities, tribes, governments, and other organizations to ensure the report contents are useful and able to inform and empower their adaptation efforts. This is particularly true for informing efforts to alleviate particularly climate-vulnerable groups. Our staff are leading the outreach to tribal communities, and we have partnered with another non-profit, Regeneración, who are coordinating farmworker outreach and the social vulnerability sections of the report.
​We invite you to be part of this important effort. Join us by sharing your insights, attending workshops, or contributing to our research. Whether you’re a community member, land manager, scientist, or policymaker your participation can help shape a more resilient future for California’s Central Coast. We welcome anyone to submit information or perspectives you would like to see included in the report, request to review preliminary drafts, or set up an interview to discuss your concerns.
​To get involved, please fill out this form which is soliciting feedback on climate change concerns, adaptation efforts, and informational needs of communities within the Central Coast region. You can also email our Climate Change Science Director Dr. Nathan Van Schmidt directly at [email protected]. 

Forecasting the Future of California’s Climate, Land Use, and Water Supply

Picture

SFBBO staff co-developed several versions of LUCAS (Land Use and Carbon Scenario Simulator), a simulation model that can jointly forecast land use change, water supplies, and carbon emissions. These models were applied to the Central Coast region of California and sought to examine how water agencies were implementing California’s landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), and in turn simulate how different water sustainability strategies under SGMA could translate to future patterns of housing and agricultural development. 

​​We showed that in the context of climate change and future development, demand-side water sustainability strategies—such as incentives to reduce groundwater withdrawals and targeted land conservation—were far more effective than supply-side measures like water recycling and desalination. While expanding water supplies often led to continued overuse, aligning development with existing water availability successfully stabilized groundwater levels. However, restricting withdrawals in regulated areas led to unintended consequences, shifting agricultural expansion into unregulated basins, further stressing water resources and ecosystems. Negative impacts of this “leakage” of development pressure could be readily achieved by strategically prioritizing habitat conservation in key at-risk areas.

This research underscores the importance of integrated land and water management in achieving long-term groundwater sustainability in California. A subsequent trade-off analysis showed such integrated approaches could lead to win-win scenarios for human, ecological, and agricultural communities in California.
​
This participatory research program was completed working closely with water agencies and land use planners. The spatial data produced by the land use and water supply forecasts, as well as the vulnerability maps, have been made freely available to help inform their subsequent planning to help achieve a more sustainable California.

Fostering The Resilience of Waterbirds to Climate Change

Picture

​​Within San Francisco Bay, our waterbird research is closely tied to our climate change research. Rising seas under climate change threaten our tidal wetlands. Altering patterns of precipitation and water use can profoundly impact freshwater wetlands, drying habitats during worsening droughts. Because many waterbirds of the Pacific Flyway that use San Francisco Bay as migratory staging or wintering grounds breed in northern Canada, they are also impacted by the more severe warming of polar regions we are experiencing under climate change. Many waterbirds of the Pacific Flyway in California are undergoing dramatic declines, and SFBBO’s research is seeking to disentangle these complex and interrelated potential drivers to identify the key management interventions we can take to recover these populations. (photo by Sreedhara Alavattam)

​These stressors can be especially pronounced for saline specialist waterbirds like phalaropes and California Gulls. Unsustainable water withdrawals for agriculture have already reduced the resilience of the Great Salt Lake and other saline lakes across the Great Basin, making them more fragile. This leaves them at-risk of ecosystem collapse under severe droughts expected under climate change. San Francisco Bay’s remaining salt pond habitats may be able to offer a resilient habitat alternative for these species, which is an active area of SFBBO research. ​Furthermore, increased warming in polar regions is likely to cause greater impacts on migratory waterbirds of the Pacific Flyway, many of which breed in northern Canada.
​This also dovetails with our efforts to inform tidal marsh restoration with San Francisco Bay. Restoration of tidal marsh habitats will impact habitat availability of different waterbirds, many of whom have potentially competing habitat needs. These perspectives inform our Avian Use of Salt Pond Research and Plover and Tern Recovery Program.
​
See the recent Birdy Hour talk by our Science Director for a deeper dive into this topic.

​View Our Findings and Data

Click on the links below to view our data and reports. For information about our climate change research or to discuss collaborations involving our data, please contact Science Director Nathan Van Schmidt at nvanschmidt@sfbbo.org.