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As a result, the climate changes already measured and those predicted in the future differ considerably from place to place. The southwestern US is encountering increasing drought, the Northwest is undergoing longer, dryer summers and declining snowpacks, the Northeast has seen increased rainfall and flooding, warmer winters, and longer growing seasons; the Southeast, warmer winters with dryer summers; and the neotropics (Puerto Rico and Hawaii), increasing warmth and aridity, rising sea levels, and tropical storms of increasing intensity.

Forests and grasslands will experience regional and local changes in temperature and precipitation, and are likely to experience increases in the variability of weather, such as droughts, storms and heat waves. Because the ecosystems in these regions also differ, land management actions will need to vary widely in response to these differing climate changes and ecological effects. A fundamental challenge posed by changing climate must be resolved through land management— the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere by increasing its sequestration in ecosystems and wood/energy products, while enhancing the adaptation of these ecosystems to increasing changes due to climate.

Additionally, the approaches to be employed by managers in the NFS, in working to maintain the variety of ecosystem goods and services demanded by the public, may be quite different in specific locales from those employed by other landowners nearby, as their goals and objectives may differ. These considerations argue for a localized approach to land management.

Land managers have conveyed a sense of urgency, a real-time need for information. They are faced with planning for and making climate change related decisions today and need all available scientific information to support these decisions. The needs for this scientific information will be honed in real time if a healthy learning environment is developed where researchers and managers testing new adaptation strategies share their successes and failures across landscapes, regions, and agencies. Land managers recently reported a variety of research needs, which can generally be divided into four categories (see Appendix X).

• First, is the strong need simply to understand the basic concepts associated with global change relevant to land management (e.g., vocabulary, ecosystem responses, etc.).
• Second is a need to understand how climate change can be integrated into multiple use management(e.g., balancing stocking densities with other ecosystem services provisions, climate impacts on fire, etc).
• Third, tools are needed to implement climate change strategies in the specific forests being managed (e.g., local scenarios, vegetation projection models, vulnerabilities and risk predictions, etc.).
• Fourth is the need for increased interagency cooperation and outreach to citizens and other stakeholders (e.g., adjacent landscapes, stakeholder input to decisions and actions, etc.).

A FS National Global Change Strategy and the concomitant research needed to implement it must be in place to balance and coordinate responses to these differences, as the basis for a unified approach to managing within the uncertainty of changing climates.

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