Climate Foresight: Putting Cutting-Edge Modeling of Resource Vulnerability to Future Climate in the Hands of Managers

SciCast Webinar presented by Forest Service Research and Development

Forest management commonly focuses on reducing the risk of wildfire impacts along with a myriad of other objectives including delivery of wood products, restoration, resilience, and ecosystem services. Forest Service research has been working for decades to better understand system dynamics to inform management, enhance its success, and develop tools that put the power of that information directly in the hands of managers.

We are witnessing the impacts of climate on many resource conditions, diminishing the ability of management investments to achieve desired outcomes. Taking future climate constraints into account as an integrated approach to identifying management opportunities is becoming essential for landscape planning and implementation. The Pacific Southwest Research Station, in collaboration with the Spatial Informatics Group, developed a model – PROMOTe – for evaluating future climate constraints on forest ecosystem outcomes (ecological and social). It’s now part of the publicly available Planscape tool and ready to be used for integrated forest and landscape planning and implementation. We will provide an overview of the PROMOTe model inner workings and outputs and then demonstrate how it has been integrated into the Planscape tool in the Climate Foresight module.