Meade Krosby | Search USGS

USGS2026

At the leading edge: Advancing and bridging the science and management of range-shifting species

Climate-mediated shifts in species distributions are reshaping ecosystems worldwide, creating major challenges for conservation and resource management. These range shifts have far-reaching ecological and socio-economic consequences, requiring managers to address complex ecological dynamics while navigating diverse regulatory and value systems. Despite growing attention, key gaps remain in supporting management, from improved understanding of the mechanisms of range shifts, to evaluating the effectiveness of climate adaptation strategies, and tailoring science to the institutional and social contexts of decision-making. Central challenges include scaling processes across space, time, and organizational levels, and reconciling mismatches between biogeographical and management scales. Progress will depend on more comprehensive datasets to assess outcomes across taxa and regions, stronger cross-jurisdictional cooperation, and decision frameworks that integrate uncertainty alongside multiple value systems. Addressing these gaps is essential to make research more actionable and to enable successful management of species redistribution.

BioScience↗

USGS2020

A guidebook to spatial datasets for conservation planning under climate change in the Pacific Northwest

This guidebook provides user-friendly overviews of a variety of spatial datasets relevant to conservation and management of natural resources in the face of climate change in the Pacific Northwest, United States. Each guidebook chapter was created using a standardized template to summarize a spatial dataset or a group of closely related datasets. Datasets were selected according to standardized criteria based on input through a collaborative process involving researchers and natural-resource managers throughout the Pacific Northwest region. In each chapter, basic spatial and temporal information is provided for the dataset, along with a conceptual overview, glossary of key terms, links to download data and supporting documentation, a brief methods summary describing how the dataset was created, guidelines for dataset interpretation, assessment of uncertainties along with evaluation of caveats and simplifying assumptions, and information about potential and actual conservation applications of the dataset. Collectively, this information provides natural-resource managers with “snapshots” of a variety of datasets representing diverse processes and conditions, including climate projections, changes in hydrologic conditions, vegetation and fire-regime shifts, animal habitat changes, species movements, and topographic and soil conditions relevant to climate change. Along with other types of data and site-specific information, the datasets described in this guidebook have the potential to inform management of valued natural resources throughout the Pacific Northwest region in the context of adaptation to changing climate conditions.

Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington↗