Supporting U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Species Status Assessments Efforts with Climate Scenario Planning Tools Active

A rapidly changing climate during this century poses a high risk for impacts to ecosystems, biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. A better understanding of how climate change might alter temperature, precipitation, heat stress, water availability and other extreme weather metrics in the coming century would be useful to natural resource managers at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the North Central region. Particularly, when they prepare to conduct Species Status Assessments to better evaluate risk to ecosystems, biodiversity and traditional livelihoods resulting from a changing climate.

Scientists have traditionally gone through the time intensive process of extracting and analyzing different climate datasets (e.g., temperature and precipitation) to produce a comprehensive quantitative summary for different climate scenarios. However, these methods have not been efficient in meeting the growing demand and is challenging the capacity of the human resources. This project aims to develop a web-based interactive tool to deliver such information in a much more timely and user-friendly manner.

This research project will develop an interactive tool using the existing computational and data-intensive platform provided by the Climate Toolbox, a highly recognized data delivery and climate analytic tool. Using this existing structure to develop this much needed tool will make the process more efficient, cost effective, and assure its long-term maintenance. The US Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and regional Tribe cooperators will inform the development of this tool, including developing new datasets and functionalities for the tool, and assessing its usability. The resulting open-source tool will be accessible and applicable to a wide variety of CASC-stakeholders across the contiguous United States.