Improvements in downscaled climate projections, ecological models, and remote sensing have enabled a proliferation of geospatial datasets (maps) representing spatial patterns in climate vulnerability for aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Local, regional, and continental-scale maps are published regularly illustrating projected changes in climate variables, watershed hydrology, species geographic ranges, fire regimes, landscape connectivity, soil processes, and vegetation characteristics. Collectively, these maps supply a wealth of information to support climate-change adaptation. However, managers encounter multiple challenges when attempting to apply these diverse maps to conservation planning and implementation. Maps created by multiple research teams using various assumptions, methods, time-scales, climate models, conceptual definitions, and caveats on interpretation can create confusion and information overload. A regional synthesis effort for approximately 25 such maps for the Pacific Northwest seeks to improve their usefulness to managers and increase their applications to on-the-ground conservation efforts. The synthesis workflow and products were co-designed with natural-resource managers from Federal and state agencies, tribes, and non-profit conservation organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Results/Conclusions
A qualitative synthesis across maps provides a user-friendly guidebook for managers describing basic spatial properties for each map along with data-access links, methods of creation, assumptions and caveats, representations of key ecological processes, potential and actual conservation uses, and appropriate scales and contexts of use for decision making. A parallel quantitative synthesis of multiple conceptually related maps illustrates spatial patterns in agreement and difference. For example, a synthesis of maps representing topographic diversity and soil sensitivity identified watersheds across the Pacific Northwest with topoedaphic characteristics that may support climate resilience based on agreement across multiple independent datasets. Together, the qualitative and quantitative syntheses provide managers with an accessible overview of available datasets representing a wide variety of information relevant to climate-adaptation planning. The participatory model for this synthesis effort is transparent and reproducible in other regions. As maps of climate-ecology patterns and processes continue to be produced and refined, bridging the gap between research and management applications will increasingly require such approaches to summarize, integrate, compare, and derive conclusions from many diverse sources.