Study shows some WV areas resilient to climate change

The Nature Conservancy used computer modeling based on geographic information data to study 156 million acres of land to determine how climate change might affect the mid Atlantic and northeast United States and southeastern Canada.

Rodney Bartgis, executive director of West Virginia’s Nature Conservancy chapter, said the study includes the Allegheny Mountains, Eastern Panhandle and the Southeastern part of the state.

“And the places in West Virginia that would pop out were the places that many people are familiar with, Dolly Sods, the Cheat Mountain area, Cranberry area the southeastern part of the Greenbrier Valley for instance,” Bartgis said.

The study considered whether an area has characteristics like ecological and landform variations.

“If you have a type of setting like a mid elevation sandstone site, did you have it then on south facing slopes, west facing slopes, north facing slopes,” Bartgis said. “And then we asked ‘where are those things well connected so if you are on one setting you could easily get to another.'”

Bartgis said the places that will be less affected by climate change also have a lot of intact forest cover without large breaks like highways that would interfere with species moving around or with the ecological process of forest development. This kind of landscape provides plants and animals the flexibility to adapt and relocate as climate change takes place.

The Nature Conservancy plans to use the study results to set the organizations priorities. Bartgis says there are a couple of places the Conservancy considers more valuable to protect now that they are considered more resilient. They are the Cacapon watershed along the Virginia-West Virginia border and just to the west of the South Branch of the Potomac River.

“And these are not areas that we have focused on and now we see that they have importance,” Bartgis said.

Bartgis hopes other land trust organizations and government agencies will be able to use the study to guide preservation effort and land management policy. Bartgis said it’s important to protect natural corridors from development. He hopes the study can also inform policy decisions.

“For instance many of these ridges are starting to get proposals for industrial wind turbine projects and we certainly wouldn’t want to see all of our corridors that are important for having a future that’s resilient to climate change also ironically damaged by attempts to come up with renewable energy alternatives as well,” Bartgis said.