Co-production and modeling landscape change - successes and challenges in developing useful climate science
Abstract
Responding to the impacts of climate change and generating information that helps inform resource management requires exceptional communication and collaboration among researchers, managers, and other stakeholders. However, there is relatively little guidance on how to practically develop, facilitate, and evaluate this process given the highly specific and localized nature of many co-production efforts in terms of information needs, research questions, partners, and associated institutions. The Integrated Ecosystem Model (IEM) for Alaska and Northwest Canada was developed to understand how climate change influences interactions among disturbance (e.g. wildfire, thermokarst), permafrost, hydrology, and vegetation and identify how these changes affect valuable ecosystem services. The IEM was a unique co-production effort in that it was driven by broad management interests (rather than one research question), and because of the landscape-scale outputs, much broader engagement was warranted. Communication between the research team and the broader community of resource managers was facilitated by the Alaska Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and the Alaska Climate Science Center. Team members' reflections on the project confirm the importance of deliberate approaches to collaboration, where everyone has frequent opportunities to discuss goals, assumptions, and presumed outcomes of the project itself, as well as the elements of the process (i.e. meetings, reports, etc.). However, managing these activities requires significant time, resources, and perhaps more dedicated personnel. The lessons learned from the design and application of the IEM are highly relevant to researchers and land managers in other regions that are considering the development of a similar tool or an undertaking of similar magnitude, scale, and complexity.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMGC31A0991T
- Keywords:
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- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES