Integrated climate scenarios of the Pacific Northwest Grant

Environmental changes, caused by climate change and landscape transformation, such as habitat degradation and the arrival of competitive invasive species, can strain the delivery of natural resources, push rare plants and animals towards extinction, and pose a direct challenge to resource managers. As scientists work to understand and predict the effects of climate change, foundational pieces of knowledge they require are how climate, vegetation, and the water cycle will change in the future.

This project will integrate, for the first time, state-of-the-science predictive models of these environmental attributes of the Northwest U.S. The resulting datasets will be compatible with other hydrological and ecological modeling projects and will ultimately will lead to a next-generation climate change framework that allows land managers to identify potentially vulnerable areas, prioritize investment in projects to increase the resilience of forests and grasslands, and incorporate projected changes in fire danger into development of water and forest management plans, state forest assessments, and other strategic land management plans.