Accelerating the Incorporation of Climate Change Knowledge into Adaptation Planning for National Park Service Assets in the Great Lakes Region

The project will extend the information developed for the 2013 ISRO project to Apostle Islands NL (APIS), which shares climate and weather vulnerabilities with ISRO. The University of Michigan will reuse the resources and processes completed during the ISRO project to engage park staff and provide climate information that balances management expectations, usability, and resources with scientific salience, credibility and legitimacy. The goal is to streamline the process of developing the necessary climate science, at a management-relevant scale, to allow NPS professionals to re-use basic climate scenarios toward a variety of management issues. The cooperators will use the GLISAclimate.org database to determine overlap of climate drivers between ISRO and APIS with the goal to enable and support the provision of tailored climate information and the generation of climate scenarios to meet NPS goals. The ISRO scenario work focused on specific management decisions around changing vegetation patterns and impacts to large mammals. Following the identification of APIS management needs,, cooperators will pursue a set of applications that will inform decisions related to these needs. The work will be transferable and will result in a resource foundation that can be extended to national parks and other public and private entities in the Upper Great Lakes Region.