Assessing Climate Change for Landscapes and Major Vegetation Types across the Inter-Mountain West

Historical climate variation occurs on multiple dimensions, including temporal (inter-annual variability) and biotic (variation across a vegetation type’s niche in environmental space). We interpret climate change through these different lenses, each of which contributes a distinct and ecologically relevant picture of exposure to climate change.
**
These assessments bring together data on exposure and resilience to measure and map climate change vulnerability across it full geographic range. Exposure includes changes in climate suitability – as an indication of climate stress - as compared to a mid-20th century baseline. Resilience measures address factors in response to climate exposure that could mitigate or exacerbate effect of climate stress. Measures for Resilience are categorized into Sensitivity and Adaptive Capacity. Sensitivity includes estimates of landscape intactness or condition, invasive species abundance, relative degree of natural wildfire regime alteration (e.g., through wildfire suppression, etc.), and elevated insect or disease risk in forests. Adaptive capacity includes estimates of natural diversity within functional species groups (e.g., nitrogen fixing plants, seed dispersing animals), relative vulnerability of any apparent “keystone” species (e.g., prairie dogs), and topoclimatic variability, or the microclimate variability naturally occurring due to rugged vs. flat topography.