Ecological systems are being strongly influenced by both rapid climate change and human perturbation. The conservation of existing ecosystems and the restoration of degraded ecosystems require information on likely ecological trajectories and future ecological states with climate change. Ecological communities and individual species are at risk of extirpation from rapid climate change singly, or in conjunction with anthropogenic fragmentation of the landscape that limits the potential for range shifts. Other ecological systems have already been degraded directly by human activities or indirectly through anthropogenic alteration of natural disturbance regimes. The restoration of degraded ecological systems requires an endpoint or target ecological state toward which restoration efforts drive the system. A restoration target might be a measure of biodiversity, a particular species composition, or an ecosystem service. The identification of the target ecological state can be difficult because of limited historical information on the "natural" state of the system. Rapid climate change complicates the process of ecological restoration because the target state of the ecosystem is not static, but changes dynamically in response to climate forcing. Restoration targets should be adjusted to account for changing climatic conditions as the pre-degradation ecological condition might no longer be the natural state or even attainable give current climatic conditions. Similarly, defining conservation goals in the context of climate change should consider predicted climate change and resulting effects on species distributions and range shifts in human dominated landscapes. We will specifically address the following questions in the context of diverse ecological systems: (1) What should be the nature of the goals and processes involved in ecosystem conservation and restoration given climate change? (2) How should future ecosystem states be identified given rapid climate change and limited historical information on past states? (3) In what ways might ecological and climatological modeling be used to enhance concepts for ecological conservation in a time of global climate change? We will bring together scientists with diverse perspectives to address the challenges of conserving and restoring ecological systems in a period of rapid climate change. Speakers will include ecological modelers, paleoecologists, and empirical ecologists; their collective expertise will serve to establish both the conceptual and pragmatic basis for ecosystem management with climate change. One result of this session will be an exploration of the utility of coupling regional climate models with ecological models to forecast future ecosystem states, while also discussing the limitations of this approach.