Selecting Climate Projections for Public Land Management Decision-making: experiences in the U.S. Forest Service

The 2012 Planning Rule for the U.S. Forest Service requires that land managers consider historic, current and future conditions. The latter will likely entail systematically incorporating downscaled climate projections into formal agency planning processes in a way that has never been done before. This paper reviews lessons learned to-date from applying future climate information in the agency, highlights the need for developing a standardized process to work through the many considerations involved in climate data selection, and presents a high-level framework for accomplishing this.