Climate Adaptation for Land Trusts - Message 4 (Reminders)

View as Webpage

Climate Adaptation for Land Trusts Course

Reminders: Course Assignments

Our next session will be on Wednesday, May 25th, 10 - 11:30 am pacific (11aMT/12pCT/1pET) where we will discuss your adaptation projects.

Before next session:

Review the Quick Start Guide to Climate Adaptation (also listed below) and print off paper copies of any resources you want to take to your site visit.

Review any relevant impact and vulnerability resources. Complete the regional impacts column for step 2.

Visit your project site and complete the worksheets from the Quick Start Guide (no need to turn these in). Due Monday, May 23rd.

Share your field site location, a picture of your site, and a brief description of your project site via the padlet app. Due Monday, May 23rd.

Get ready to share your experience and ideas during our May 25th session.

View the course website

Resources

We had many requests for resources during our second session! We've compiled some of them below. If we're missing something or if you'd like to discuss more, please schedule an appointment during office hours or send us an email.

Outreach and Climate Change Adaptation

Some of you expressed interest in how to translate the ideas in this course to recommendations for landowners. In one example, the Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary used the Adaptation Workbook to select adaptation actions for their property, and produced a series of outreach materials targeted at foresters and landowners.

For more on the mapping of public perception on climate issues, see the Yale Climate communications opinion map.

Conservation Easements

The Land Trust Alliance has developed practical pointers for drafting conservation easements and for stewardship administration under climate change.

Drought resources

We had questions in many of the breakout rooms about drought. Here is a compiled list of some of the resources that were mentioned:

The Southwest Climate Hub has a list of Drought Tools; see in particular the Drought Impacts Toolkit
For more on drought and ecosystem impacts, see Drought vulnerability of rangelands in Arizona & New Mexico
General information on Drought and natural land management
Drought datasets (conterminous US coverage)

California Resources

In addition to drought information mentioned above, our California group discussed some of the following:

Cal-Adapt Climate Tools: the Local Snapshot is a great starting place
The California Forest Observatory is useful for visualizing a variety of forest and fire data layers that are updated regularly. This is a fairly new tool though, so please recognize it’s still being ground-truthed by external parties.
The Climate Adapted Seed Tool helps ecosystem managers identify seed sources that are pre-adapted to local climate conditions at their planting sites (for 3 conifer species).
The CAL FIRE Resources website has links to the Forest management handbook for small-parcel landowners in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade Range towards the bottom of the page.
Full Handbook
Summary of Handbook
2-page overview

Invasive species

Web reporting and tracking for invasive species.To find the current distribution of an invasive species by county go to the distribution maps page, then select a species from the list that will take you to a map. At the map click the “counties” button, and explore the potential future range of this species by clicking the “future range” button.

Tree Habitat Climate Projections

For the eastern U.S. see the Climate Change Tree Atlas for projections of future suitable habitat under different climate scenarios.

General Climate Information

See the Climate Toolbox for a wide range of web tools for climate visualization for the contiguous United States.

Course Guide

Course Guidebook

We will use the Adaptation Quick Guide for Land Trusts throughout this course. The guide draws on the five-step Adaptation Workbook process to help you design and implement adaptation actions in your work, with a special eye toward stewardship activities.

Download the Quick Guide

Have questions or need additional assistance? Schedule office hours to meet with an instructor here.

If you have any questions, please use this week to schedule office hours with course instructors.

Thank you, have a great week!

Kristen Schmitt, Danielle Shannon