Despite decades of scientific research on climate change, little of this information is incorporated into public land management and conservation planning. Federal agencies are increasingly called upon to think ahead towards future climate, species distributions and habitat scenarios, yet the scale of climate change science is rarely appropriate for informing these efforts. Down-scaled global climate models (GCMs) are a tool that are proving to be useful for long-term conservation planning. Data from 5 GCMs downscaled to 2 km resolution is available for Alaska from the University of Alaska.  We summarized temperature, precipitation, extreme events, growing season projections, and other climate metrics for federal lands in Alaska.  The next step was to incorporate these data into process models, including fire and water availability, to consider possible landscape changes.

Results/Conclusions

The future climate scenario maps provide a tool that helps land managers and biologists visualize the potential changes in store for Alaska’s national wildlife refuges, parks, forests and other public lands.  Keeping in mind the assumptions incorporated into such projections, these data were used to develop hypotheses about future habitat and ecosystem conditions.  From these hypotheses, land managers were able to refine the research questions guiding biological research and monitoring programs.  Incorporating climate scenarios into a fire model produced maps which showed shifts in forest community types and are being used in developing land management plans.  In another example, the impact of growing season changes on water availability is being used to consider the cumulative effects of climate change and development on surface water resources.  These case studies reveal how climate change science, with all its uncertainty, can be used as a tool for guiding research and monitoring today to help plan for the future.