The Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative (Desert LCC) is designing a process that will:
- produce spatially explicit data and information about focal resources, chosen by the Desert LCC partners;
- seek to understand the effects of climate change and other landscape stressors on natural resources;
- integrate social and economic information to understand what these resources might look like in the future; and
- look at specific focal areas to develop collaborative adaptation responses that are useful and implementable by our partners.
Where this work is being done:
In the face of rapid climatic shifts, natural resource managers and conservation practitioners are increasingly faced with managing system transformations; and we may need to focus our attention on sustaining functioning ecological systems rather than the historical assemblages of plants and animals within those systems. One of the best ways to facilitate successful implementation of strategies for adapting to changing conditions is through integrating, or “mainstreaming,” adaptation into our existing activities and way of life. By working together to incorporate adaptation into our existing natural resource management decision processes, we can have a collective impact on sustaining ecosystem function and services and conserving natural resources for people and wildlife across the landscape. With funding from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the Desert LCC is developing an ecosystem stewardship approach that integrates societal values and ecological sustainability using landscape design and leveraging the Bureau of Land Management’s Rapid Ecoregional Assessments and other resources.
