Ambarish Karmalkar | Search USGS

USGS2025

Relationship-centered engagement bridges the divide between science and management, and enhances climate adaptation

The rapid pace of climate change demands changes in management practices. Despite abundant climate adaptation research, the implementation of climate adaptation can lag in the management space. In the present article, we argue that relationship-centered engagement—establishing and maintaining relationships among researchers and natural resource managers—is critical for bridging the research–management gap. We evaluated researcher–manager partnerships within the US Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and identified three cultural shifts that institutions, funders, researchers, and managers could adopt to boost the odds of translating findings into action: acknowledging and supporting the central role of relationships in creating and implementing actionable science, lengthening funding timelines to better support establishing and maintaining relationships, and aligning institutional rewards to support relationship building. A renewed focus on relationships can lead to more diverse and effective partnerships that bridge knowledge to practice and hasten adaptation to climate change.

BioScience↗

USGS2024

A regional synthesis of climate data to inform the 2025 State Wildlife Action Plans in the Northeast U.S.

The State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) are proactive planning documents, known as “comprehensive wildlife conservation strategies,” that assess the health of each state’s wildlife and habitats, identify current management and conservation challenges, and outline needed actions to conserve natural resources over the long term. SWAPs are revised every 10 years, with the last revision in 2015 and the next revision anticipated in 2025. State managers have a long history of managing for threats such as land-use change, pollution, and harvest. However, they have expressed a lack of expertise and capacity to keep pace with the rapid advances in climate science and noted that much of the information available is not scaled to meet their needs; thus making the prospect of integrating climate information into SWAPs a daunting task. (Johnson, 2018; Yocum et al., 2021; Blandford, 2022). This report, led by the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC), directly addresses SWAP climate science data needs through a Northeast regional synthesis across four key areas of climate science: 1) observed and projected climate changes, 2) species responses to climate change, 3) climate vulnerabilities and risks, and 4) scale-specific adaptation strategies and actions. In addition, case studies of climate adaptation efforts and climate threat to-action narratives provide illustrative examples of how climate change frameworks and tools are being operationalized in decision-making processes related to Regional Species of Greatest Conservation Need (RSGCN) and their habitats across the region. Lists of recent climate resources were also synthesized into extensive data tables to provide SWAP writing teams with a comprehensive platform of information to support content development (AFWA 2022).

Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachuse↗