CCRC Home > Research Strategy

• Enhancing our understanding of the changing effects of climate on populations, communities, ecosystems and landscapes, as well as on ecological processes at multiple scales.
• Expand our current knowledge of paleo-ecology and of paleo climate-vegetation dynamics to identify metrics to monitor ecosystems under a changing climate, and to define range of variability at local sites across ecosystems.
• Developing genetics information to identify species to plant and seed sources for reforestation, afforestation and gene conservation.
• Documenting interactions between multiple stresses under a changing climate, and potential for linear/nonlinear threshold responses to climate change,
• Enhancing our understanding of the changing relationships between climate and climate-mediated disturbances such as fire, insects, and disease.
• Developing needed scientific information, biotic and environmental monitoring methods, and models (including scalability and uncertainty measures) for decision-making in resource management and greater understanding of human and organizational adaptation to climate change.
• Focusing on understandings to increase and retain the sustainability of ecosystem services, particularly of water supplies, wildlife and fish populations, endangered species, and forest and grassland products.
• Enhancing understanding of the changing relationships between climate, land use change and climate-mediated disturbances.
• Reducing the uncertainties in climate projections and ecosystem responses to increase adaptive management options, and improve evaluation of tradeoffs when managing for all ecosystem services.
• Develop new methods to monitor and quantify the impacts of climate change and elevated carbon dioxide on ecosystem productivity, and water, nutrient and energy cycling.
• Beginning experimental testing of management and adaptation options on the ground to develop strategies for risk-spreading and conserving/enhancing broad-sense ecosystem productivity and health.

Near-Term Research Products

Research on enhancing ecosystem resilience under increasing climate stress will focus on developing and implementing a coordinated series of regional syntheses on the potential vulnerabilities and ecosystem responses to a changing climate for application by land managers.

• We will undertake integrated assessments of climate change impacts on ecosystems to determine potential impacts on ecosystem services, assess the vulnerabilities across different spatial scales including identification of potential "hotspots", assess potential management strategies and uncover potential unintended consequences of mitigation and adaptation actions.
• We will develop educational tools (courses, workshops, manuals, models) for all FS personnel, to teach the principles of climate change science and their applications in planning and managing sustainable ecosystems under changing climate.

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