Climate Change in Wildlands: Pioneering Approaches to Science and Management

by: Andrew J. Hansen, William B. Monahan, S. Thomas Olliff, David M. Theobald

Land managers have a responsibility to preserve the ecological integrity of
the landscapes they manage. Climate change is a global phenomenon affecting these landscapes in complex ways. Adaptation to climate change
to sustain ecological integrity requires understanding how this global phenomenon will play out at the landscape scale. Thus, managers and members
of the public who care about natural systems share a need to translate the
effects of global climate change to the scale of a park, forest, refuge, or
other management unit. Complicating this translation are coincident and
interacting changes in land use. The challenge of maintaining the ecological
integrity of natural landscapes under the dual onslaught of climate change
and land use change is a seemingly hopeless task for those managing locally
without direct access to the regional, much less global, picture. Bringing
the bigger picture to land managers responding to a rapidly changing world
is possible, as the following pages make clear. Required is an integration of
the latest observation technologies, including satellites imaging globally at
landscape resolutions (i.e., pixel sizes ranging from tens to hundreds of
square meters) and an interoperable framework for climate and ecological
models to relate climate and land use changes to ecological responses.