Infrastructure. There are national facilities and infrastructure needs critical to FS research succeeding in addressing climate change. A remote sensing capability is necessary to attain goals for carbon sequestration, ecosystem resilience, bio-product generation and decision support. A strong program to format and downscale climate model projections for research and management use and the ability to monitor changes and the impacts of land management decisions are also critical infrastructure needs. Similarly, all three research elements require capabilities in vegetation inventory and analysis (including Forest Inventory and Analysis), genetic analysis and selection, air/land/water monitoring, modeling at several different scales, and integrated assessment modeling to reveal unintended consequences of future policies.

Even with good interagency cooperation, it is clear that FS needs to create a comprehensive environmental simulation modeling center with the required personnel and computing infrastructure specifically designed to meet the needs of FS and state and private resource managers in land management planning and project management. The center must be capable of modeling air, water, forests, woodlands, and grasslands, including processes in individual sites and stands, species populations, landscapes, and regions. It must be responsible for obtaining downscaled climate scenarios, formatting and maintaining data sets, and capable of providing the quantification and future projections needed for various assessments of climate change related questions.

Other actions the FS should take to enhance common facilities and assets, before or during development of a modeling center include the following:

• Coordinate Data. The collection, consolidation, and formatting of data for analysis and modeling must be significantly enhanced, as they are the basis for developing comprehensive, mechanistic understandings of climate change effects.
• Share Data. The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has the most complete and comprehensive monitoring database in the world. Moreover, many types of important global change research data could be collected by FIA at minimal cost to improve climate change research efforts.
• Experimental Forests and Ranges (EFRs) and Research Natural Areas (RNAs) must be used in future global change research. Experiments that define ecosystem responses to climate change along temperature and precipitation gradients can be conducted entirely on EFRs and RNAs. Moreover, most of the EFRs and some of the RNAs have long-term, spatial data that could be provided to global change scientists at minimal cost.
• An intra-agency competitive grants program, or an interagency program open to all federal and nonfederal scientists, is an effective means to maintaining a cohesive and successful national research strategy.

Scientific Collaboration. Climate change science is complex and requires the interactive research by scientists from many different disciplines, only a few of which are represented at any one research station or laboratory. While there is already considerable collaboration and communication between scientists in the FS research and management communities, much more can be done to facilitate and improve collaborative studies across station boundaries.

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