Information as Adaptation to a Changing Climate: Managing the Intersection of Forests, Fish, Fire, and Water Resources on Public Lands

Climate change is altering the wildlands of the west, principally through changes in the water cycle. In many places there is and will be less water than there once was, and such water as there is will runoff from mountain snowpacks earlier each year. A drier climate in the western U.S. will promote a greater role of fire and other mortality events for many forests. Consequently, how managers prepare for and respond to events such as fire, or large scale insect outbreaks is becoming more important as the climate changes. Sometimes, these events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems, and sometimes they generate stepwise changes in ecosystems, making it clear that climate vulnerability assessments should account for disturbance in their calculus. We describe a framework of how fire and climate change work together to affect forest and fish communities. Learning how to adapt will come from testing, probing, and pushing that framework to discover the most robust strategies to increased disturbance risks. The western U.S. defies generalizations, and much learning must necessarily be local in implication. We argue that successful adaptation does not simply constitute setting forest and stream communities on the appropriate path, rather it requires teaching wildland resource managers how to learn quickly and respond insightfully as the events associated climate change unfold.