99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

OOS 24

Ecosystem Resilience and Lessons Learnt from Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments

Climate change is projected to jeopardize ecosystems function worldwide. Managing ecosystems for future resilience requires collaboration, innovation and communication. Scientists have responded to the need for addressing climate change and assessing vulnerability and adaptive response by providing an assortment of information sources – everything from guidebooks to data repositories to carbon calculators and modeling tools. However, the abundance of information and the uncertainty around both climate change projections and impacts has not been provided with practical guidance to managers who have little funding and limited time to digest and incorporate available material into planning and implementation documents. Conversely, there is little commonly available or widespread guidance for scientists to develop climate change-related tools for the management community, with many tools not considering management needs and priorities. We propose to galvanize experts, innovators, and learning network members to present results and lessons learnt while working with land managers to design effective management strategies and address climate change challenges. We have organized the session such that first managers from federal agencies will tell us how they have approached the federal mandate to evaluate both short-term and long-term climate change risks and vulnerabilities to the agencies' missions, ultimately to develop, prioritize, and implement actions. During the second part of this session, we will hear from a variety of tools developers addressing the needs delineated in the first part of the session. Lastly we will hear about three concrete examples of tools that were developed to answer specific questions related to renewable energy development, species listing to ESA, and federal land exposure to climate change.