Building Collaboration Between the North Central CSC and Regional Partners Through Liaison Teams Completed

The North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) is committed to bringing the best possible climate science to bear in order to inform decisions made by Department of the Interior (DOI) planners and other land and resource managers across the country.  To help accomplish this mission, key partnerships have been established between the NC CSC and the DOI Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) in the North Central region of the U.S.  Whereas the eight Climate Science Centers have a greater emphasis on climate science delivery, the LCCs focus more generally on defining research needs for conservation, and on science and tool delivery to support conservation outcomes. 

In order to help connect the landscape-scale conservation activities of the LCC network with its climate science capacity, the NC CSC has worked with four regional LCCs and its University Consortium to establish liaison teams.  These liaison teams focused communication efforts between LCC and NC CSC leadership to enhance development of collaborative work, integrating climate science with management needs to result in cogenerated information. These liaisons were expected to help leverage the existing efforts and expertise of the USGS, staff at the NC CSC, and the NC CSC University Consortium to more directly contribute climate science collaboration and support to priority LCC activities and topics.

The objective of this collaboration was to focus on increased engagement and communication, as called for in the National Academy of Science review of the LCCs, to 1) take advantage of the LCCs’ existing and ongoing distillation of partner needs and 2) bring to bear on those needs existing NC CSC and USGS climate related science. Learn more about this collaboration and the team members here: http://nccsc.colostate.edu/meeting-stakeholder-needs