In addition to the major projects funded by the North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC), selected through its solicitation process or the directed funds going to the foundational Science Areas, there remains a need within the north central domain to support work that builds capacity among stakeholders that have been otherwise left out of the major projects funded by the NC CSC. During the course of this project, we focused on stakeholder capacity building by providing regional offerings of climate-related courses for resource managers, supporting tribal college students and deploying technology to better understand how climate impacts living things, and supporting strategic scientific study of the climate/energy/environment nexus in the Missouri River Basin. First, the NC CSC provided climate education opportunities in collaboration with the US Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center (NCTC). We offered the NCTC Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment class to managers and students from April 22 - 24, 2014 in Jackson, WY, and from September 30 - October 2, 2014 in La Crosse, WI. Future courses will include Climate Smart Conservation. The NC CSC has also worked with the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change working group to establish an Indigenous Geography Phenology Network by providing support to tribal college students to collect observations of plant and animal life-cycle stages (known as phenology) for culturally significant plants and animals, and uploading these observations to a citizen-science database (
USANPN). In addition, the NC CSC has collaborated with the USGS AmericaView program to deploy cameras that will record phenology throughout the region. Finally, we supported the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy (ICOUP) to formulate a strategic scientific study to understand and demonstrate how climate science can be integrated into resource management decisions, particularly with regard to the climate/energy/environment nexus in the Missouri River Basin.