The North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) funded research activities in order to provide pertinent climate information to natural resource managers in our region to evaluate impacts of climatic changes and to develop strategies to respond to changes affecting their natural and cultural resources.  These funded activities provided improved climate data sets, such as the high resolution temperature dataset, derived data from the latest international climate projections.

Establishing connections among natural landscapes is the most frequently recommended strategy for adapting management of natural resources in response to climate change. The U.S. Northern Rockies still support a full suite of native wildlife, and survival of these populations depends on connected landscapes. Connected landscapes support current migration and dispersal as well as future shifts in species ranges that will be necessary for species to adapt to our changing climate.
Working in partnership with state and federal resource managers and private land trusts, we sought to:

This is a spatially-explicit state-and-transition simulation model of rangeland vegetation dynamics in southwest South Dakota. It was co-designed with resource management partners to support scenario planning for climate change adaptation. The study site encompasses part of multiple jurisdictions, including Badlands National Park, Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The viability of the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) species is under threat due to precipitously declining populations.  This study investigates the sources of differing levels of concern about climate-driven effects on whitebark pine trees.  It also investigates support for different Whitebark Pine (WBP) management strategies on federal public lands. 

Identifying the climatic drivers of an ecological system is a key step in assessing its vulnerability to climate change. The climatic dimensions to which a species or system is most sensitive – such as means or extremes – can guide methodological decisions for projections of ecological impacts and vulnerabilities. However, scientific workflows for combining climate projections with ecological models have received little explicit attention.

Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0121.1): Much of the academic literature and policy discussions about sustainable development and climate change adaptation focus on poor and developing nations, yet many tribal communities inside the United States include marginalized peoples and developing nations who face structural barriers to effectively adapt to climate change.

Pan evaporation is a measure of atmospheric evaporative demand (E0) for which long term and spatially distributed observations are available from the NOAA Cooperative Observer (COOP) Network. However, this data requires extensive quality control and homogenization due to documented and undocumented station moves and other factors including human errors in recording or digitization. Station-based Pan Evaporation measurements (in mm) from 247 stations across the continental United States were compiled and quality controlled for the analysis shown in Dewes et al., 2017.

Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096317300153): In recent years, federal land management agencies in the United States have been tasked to consider climate change vulnerability and adaptation in their planning. Ecological vulnerability approaches have been the dominant framework, but these approaches have significant limitations for fully understanding vulnerability in complex social-ecological systems in and around multiple-use public lands.

In southwestern Colorado, land managers anticipate the impacts of climate change to include higher temperatures, more frequent and prolonged drought, accelerated snowmelt, larger and more intense fires, more extreme storms, and the spread of invasive species. These changes put livelihoods, ecosystems, and species at risk.