98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

OOS 30

The Climate Change Response Framework: Integrating Tools, Partnerships, and Actions to Support Climate-Smart Conservation and Forest Management

Climate change has the potential to alter the composition, structure and productivity of forested ecosystems both directly through changes in temperature and precipitation, and indirectly through changes in disturbance such as invasive species, insects and diseases, and fire. Resource managers face the immense challenge of integrating the inherent uncertainties of a changing climate into a wide variety of management decisions. The Climate Change Response Framework (Framework) is a collaborative approach among researchers, managers, and landowners to integrate climate change considerations into management. The Framework was originally developed for ecological province 212 in northern Wisconsin beginning in 2008. This session shows how the Framework was been expanded to three ecoregions within the eastern United States. The first talk in the session describes the unique attributes of the Framework and how it has successfully bridged the gap between climate change science and forest management. Subsequent talks present modeling studies that provide input into the Framework. A variety of different modeling approaches are used, including species distribution models, gap models, ecosystem process models, and spatially dynamic process models. These models use a common set of geographic areas, timeframes, and downscaled climate change models and emission scenarios to allow direct comparison among modeling approaches of projected changes in forest productivity and composition. The final talks in the session explain how this information is applied to forest management. We demonstrate how model information is incorporated to assess vulnerability of forest communities within each ecoregion. Finally, we demonstrate how this information is being used by land managers to select and implement appropriate adaptation strategies based on their specific management objectives. This integrated set of presentations provides an important example of how climate change adaptation is being successfully implemented at a variety of spatial scales.