The global environmental challenges society faces today are unheralded due to the pace at which human activities are affecting the earth system. The rates of energy consumption, nitrogen use and production, and water use increases each year leading to greater global environmental changes affecting warming of the earth system and loss of ecosystem services, and leading to emerging novel ecosystem complexes. Innovative strategies are needed to develop the adaptive management tools to integrate the sectors and science necessary to deal with the complexity of effects across appropriate temporal and spatial scales for prognostic analyses of climate which capture threshold events in ecosystem dynamics. Ecosystem dynamics can often be altered by non-linear events such as fires, pest outbreaks, or storm events. Current climate change trends are resulting in a number of thresholds affecting ecosystems in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial systems in challenging ways. Appropriate natural resource management strategies and strategies for monitoring climate signals and ecosystem responses are needed in response to our increased scientific understanding.  

Results/Conclusions

In the face of mounting evidence from the scientific community of the biological and ecological consequences of climate change, and of the possibility that changes to ecosystems may in fact be rapid, large, and sometimes irreversible threshold changes and represent challenges to policy makers and resource managers. Development of adaptive management strategies which incorporate management for resilience, adaption and coping mechanisms will be needed. These strategies need to better integrate science (physical, biological, and social knowledge), engineering, policy, and economics interests to create a framework to develop strategies for adaptation and mitigation to system level thresholds and to create bridges with institutions and organizations that deal with managing these systems in various levels of government and private sector enterprises.