adaptation

Projecting future distributions of ecosystems or species climate niches has widely been used to assess the potential impacts of climate change. However, variability in such projections for the future periods, particularly the variability arising from uncertain future climates, remains a critical challenge for incorporating these projections into climate change adaptation strategies.

Conservation science strives to inform management decisions. Applying niche models in concert with future climate projections to project species vulnerability to extinction, range size loss, or distribution shifts has emerged as a potentially useful tool for informing resource management decisions.

We present an approach to assess and compare risk from climate change among multiple species through a risk matrix, in which managers can quickly prioritize for species that need to have strategies developed, evaluated further, or watched. We base the matrix upon earlier work towards the National Climate Assessment for potential damage to infrastructures from climate change.

This guidebook contains science-based principles, processes, and tools necessary to assist with developing adaptation options for national forest lands.

Climatic change is likely to affect Pacific Northwest (PNW) forests in several important ways. In this paper, we address the role of climate in four forest ecosystem processes and project the effects of future climatic change on these processes across Washington State.