The Liaison Project increased communications between the North Central
Climate Science Center (NC CSC), other USGS Science Centers and potential collaborators
including active members of the four Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) included in
the NC CSC area. The project was initiated with listening sessions to determine partners’ interest
in liaising with the NC CSC, and USGS liaison proposals were selected based on demonstrated
ability to continue and initiate relationships with state, federal, tribal, university and other

The Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) is an experimental drought monitoring and early warning guidance tool. It examines how anomalous the atmospheric evaporative demand (E0; also known as "the thirst of the atmosphere") is for a given location and across a time period of interest. EDDI is multi-scalar, meaning that this period—or "timescale"—can vary to capture drying dynamics that themselves operate at different timescales; we generate EDDI at 1-week through 12-month timescales.

This dataset represents the area in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem prioritized for different whitebark pine(Pinus albicaulis) management activities, summarized by climate suitability zones. This data was developed for use in a landscape simulation modeling study aimed at evaluating how well alternative management strategies maintain whitebark pine populations under historical climate and future climate conditions.

This dataset represents the area in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem prioritized for different whitebark pine(Pinus albicaulis) management activities, summarized by land classes. This data was developed for use in a landscape simulation modeling study aimed at evaluating how well alternative management strategies maintain whitebark pine populations under historical climate and future climate conditions.

Natural resource managers face the need to develop strategies to adapt to projected future climates. Few existing climate adaptation frameworks prescribe where to place management actions to be most effective under anticipated future climate conditions.  We developed an approach to spatially allocate climate adaptation actions and applied the method to whitebark pine (WBP; Pinus albicaulis) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE).  WBP is expected to be vulnerable to climate-mediated shifts in suitable habitat, pests, pathogens, and fire.

Rates of climate and land use change vary across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains as do the responses of ecosystems to these changes. Knowledge of locations of rapid land use and climate change and changes in ecosystem services such as water runoff and ecological productivity are important for vulnerability assessment and crafting locally relevant adaptation strategies to cope with these changes. This project assessed the loss of public, private, and tribal lands due to ongoing land use intensifications and fragmentation extents across the NC CSC domain.

Historical and projected climate data and water balance data under three GCMs (CNRM-CM5, CCSM4, and IPSL-CM5A-MR) from 1980 to 2099 was used to assess projected climate change impacts in North Central U.S. We obtained required data from MACA data (https://climate.northwestknowledge.net/MACA/). Historical time period ranges from 1980 to 2005, and projected time period ranges from 2071 to 2099.