In the previous first phase of the Impacts and Vulnerability project, we made substantial progress in assessing climate and land use change impacts across the NCCASC domain. These include: quantifying the rates of land use change in greater wildland ecosystems (GWEs), determining the extent of fragmentation in major ecosystems across GWEs, assessing climate change impacts on public, private, and tribal lands within GWEs, evaluating evaporative demands across hydroclimatic gradients of eight ecoregions across north central U.S., and predicting forest ecosystem responses to climate change. We found that rates of climate and land use change varied across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, as did the responses of ecosystems to these changes. We also identified the major locations highly impacted by these changes that call for crafting locally relevant adaptation strategies to cope with these changes.

This second phase of the project (FY’17) aimed to generate coproduction of knowledge with a wide range of stakeholders to support decision making for the management and conservation of affected areas. During this FY’17 phase of the project, we worked with various user groups to evaluate potential land use and climate impacts and adaptation strategies for the most affected areas and ecosystem types identified by our previous work. Specifically, we focused on forest and shrubland vegetation and habitat of a selected wildlife species (Gulo gulo) in the Rocky Mountains and Washington Cascade regions. We also designed and produced resource briefs on land use and climate change assessments of selected areas and ecosystem types to provide information to coordinated management. Thirdly, we conducted series of webinars and workshops with federal, private, and NGO stakeholders to draw on all of the science results (e.g., from species distribution models, state and transition models, and mechanistic models) to identify and evaluate vegetation climate adaptation strategies for the Custer Gallatin National Forest Plan Revision that are robust under climate uncertainty.