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Current and Future Vegetation Refugia in California from 2010-2099

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Catalog Last Checked: May 05, 2026 at 09:27 PM | Dataset Last Updated: May 12, 2025 at 12:00 AM
This dataset contains rasters of vegetation refugia and habitat exposure variables for the state of California. Two potential future climate scenarios were used: warmer and wetter (CNRM-CM5), and hotter and drier (MIROC-ESM) & 2 emission scenarios: a higher level one that represents our current trajectory (RCP 8.5) and a lower level one that represents a more optimistic scenario (RCP 4.5). The vegetation exposure models used aims to help in assessing potential climatic stress to vegetation communities and this dataset contains the statewide data for use in assessing the potential risk to each of the California Allotments. Current and future vegetation stress was determined by integrating the hydroclimate data with a detailed 2015 map of the spatial patterns of California’s vegetation community types, and examining how climate conditions will change at those locations using 9 hydroclimatic variables (30-year averages) from the Basin Characterization Model. The main habitat exposure outputs contain rasters all of the climate exposure results: 1 historic run: 1981-2010 and 12 future runs: 3 time periods (2010-2039, 2040-2069, 2070-2099) under 2 emission scenarios and 2 climate scenarios as well as reclassified rasters where the outputs were binned into 5 groups. To distinguish refugia areas from high-stress areas in the climate exposure results above, the team classified the climate frequency distribution for each vegetation type, which are labeled as CA refugia combined 45 and 85 for the respective RCP. Finally, the team looked at the spatial patterns of just refugia for the 2 climate models to identify areas where they align, defined as CA refugia concensus.

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