The National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) is committed to conserving fish, wildlife, and plants for current and future generations of Americans. Given a rapidly changing climate, managers may employ various adaptation strategies to meet legislated mandates. I explore how ecological context, policy, perceptions and available ecological knowledge inform adaptation strategies. In Chapter 2, I develop an ecosystem vulnerability framework to better understand how climate change risk and ecosystem resilience interact to impact the NWRS. With GIS, I rank refuges based on historic temperature change, historic precipitation change, and sea-level rise risk. To index resilience, I rank refuges based on refuge size, landscape road density, and [...]
