Developing Tools for Climate Adaptation

Resource managers contend with achieving goals and mandates in an ever-changing world of exotic species invasions, emerging diseases, extinction risks, and shifting public expectations among others. These challenges must be faced in the context of a changing climate, which potentially alters ecosystem structure and function and undermines the predictability of ecosystem response to management actions. USGS can help managers address these challenges using a variety of tools, including assessment of trends in resource condition, structured decision techniques to elicit and prioritize management information needs, and decision support tools to make regional-scale climate vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans useful at project-planning scales. These efforts have involved federal, state, municipal, and tribal resource managers. By conveying research needs to scientists and using science to inform decision support tools, these efforts provide a direct link between research scientists and resource managers.