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• We will improve RPA assessments by adding analysis of bio-fuels, carbon, and commodity market supply and demand, to provide decision-makers with important new information about future carbon sequestration potential.
• We will work with emerging carbon markets and registries to ensure adoption of consistent and credible accounting rules and estimation guidelines.

3. Research to Provide Decision Support

Decision Support for Climate Change

Research to support policy and land manager decision-making is aimed at translating the available scientific information into useable management and planning information. Adaptation and mitigation research will have little impact without clearly articulated needs by practitioners, decision makers and policy makers. Hence, that research must be planned in response to specific decision support needs expressed by the user community.

Current Research

Decision support research involves: increasing our understanding of environmental needs by species and ecosystems for successful adaptation; the assessment of past, current, and future trends in carbon storage and release; the revision of available forest growth and production models and wildlife habitat models to include climate and climate variability; the revision of available physical (e.g., erosion) and hydrological models to include a wider range of extreme climatic events (e.g., intense rainfall); the development of carbon accounting tools for forest managers, the implementation of pilot land management planning studies; and, the development of education programs to teach managers and policymakers how to use the decision support models and documents. It is notable that many of these goals do not explicitly involve new scientific research per se, but must be based on sound science that has evolved enough to address emerging needs.

Research for decision support is primarily comprised of modeling and assessment: the creation of new models to integrate and optimize production of ecosystem services under climate change; the modification of models currently used in land management to incorporate impacts of climate change; the enhancement of data sets (including regional climate scenarios) and computing capabilities to support model development and application; and the careful analysis and synthesis of information for different audiences.

Research Needs

Research actions to enhance decision support are focused primarily on improving and creating management-friendly models that can predict ecosystem, population, and habitat responses at multiple scales of time and space. Specifically,

• Developing models that integrate linkages among climate and other stress agents, and responses by biotic and physical components of the environment, if we are to understand multiple stressors and their interactions.
• Determining the important emergent thresholds, tipping points, and phase transitions of landscapes under changing climates, by including these interactions in models used to investigate climate change, so that resource managers can anticipate those changes and plan accordingly.

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