Press Release

Indiana Dunes Climate Change Adaptation Plan presents hopeful, tangible responses to the effects of climate change

Less than 50 miles east of Chicago, the Indiana Dunes are best known for their hills of sand and sprawling beaches. But beyond being a popular tourist attraction that sees roughly two million visitors a year, the Indiana Dunes are a National Lakeshore home to prairie, forest, oak savanna, and wetland ecosystems.

“The Indiana Dunes are a unique window through time, showing how new land is transformed by plants and animals to create a wide range of habitats,” says Katherine Moore Powell, Climate Change Ecologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Despite being a unique window through time, the Indiana Dunes aren’t immune to the present: human-driven climate change already takes its toll on the Dunes’ 15,000 acres of land—an area just larger than Manhattan—causing native species to vacate and die off due to extreme heat and precipitation.

The Field Museum’s Keller Science Action Center hopes to change that narrative with its groundbreaking Indiana Dunes Climate Change Adaptation Plan.

Developed in collaboration with Save the Dunes, the park’s land managers (those who supervise the care of parklands and other protected areas), regional ecologists, climate scientists, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, this plan builds on 9 years of research on how local plants and animals can adapt to climate change.

The plan, co-authored by a team of Field Museum scientists including Moore Powell and Senior Conservation Ecologists Abigail Derby Lewis and Doug Stotz, provides what Moore Powell calls “a menu of solutions” for six priority areas along the Indiana Dunes, which runs along Lake Michigan. In other words, the plan is a resource for land managers to prioritize their efforts.

“Land managers can pull pieces from the plan,” Moore Powell adds, “and implement those with what bandwidth they have.”

The plan organizes these solutions into three categories: resistance, resilience, and transition.

Resistance refers to protecting habitats from climate change impacts. Examples of resistance-based solutions include monitoring air quality, collecting seeds, and modifying the timing of prescribed forest fires to adjust for shifting growing seasons—actions that maintain the integrity of existing habitats. Resilience, on the other hand, deals with increasing biodiversity to create a buffer against future impacts. From replacing lost trees with species from areas south of the Dunes, to helping climate-sensitive animals thrive in the Dunes’ ecosystems, resilience strategies aim to restore and strengthen compromised habitats.

Conversations about climate change actions tend to focus on resistance and resilience strategies—what we can do to stop an ecosystem from changing — but rarely address what happens after a habitat does change. That’s where transition comes in.

The plan describes transition strategies as those that “intentionally accommodate change and enable an ecosystem to respond in a deliberate way to disturbances.” In other words, transition is about finding ways to modify affected habitats to create more productive ecosystems. For instance, if a dry prairie system were to experience more precipitation and flooding, land managers could begin adjusting the species they intentionally plant to transition the land into a wet prairie habitat.

“Engaging in transition options is not giving up,” Derby Lewis says. “It’s facing reality—and realizing we can do something to keep a system functioning, even if that means doing so with a new set of players.”

Moore Powell adds that the plan offers both preventative and responsive strategies to climate change: “Mitigation and adaptation: you need both.”

Both Derby Lewis and Moore Powell emphasize that the plan serves mainly as a toolkit outlining actionable responses to climate change impacts. And the plan seems to be doing its job on that front.

“In a way, we’re affirming the good work our federal government agencies do to protect this land with limited funding,” Moore Powell says. “We’re creating a framework to make those efforts as effective as possible.”

“Lightbulbs turn on in land managers’ heads. They’re having these ‘a-ha’ moments,” Derby Lewis says. “It’s exciting and inspiring to be part of that process.”

Amid the often apocalyptic storytelling surrounding climate change, the plan’s forward-thinking approach lends a hopeful alternative—one that empowers everyday people to get involved.

“My impression is that local citizens are comforted by the fact that someone is doing something,” Moore Powell says. “We aren’t stuck in debate limbo about what’s ‘real.’ We’re examining potential impacts from climate change and we have a plan.”