Managing pinyon-juniper woodlands for resilience is increasingly challenging as climate change, altered disturbance regimes, and diverse stakeholder priorities reshape western landscapes. Across the West, these landscapes provide a wide range of ecological, cultural, economic, and recreational values, including wildlife habitat, Tribal and community resources, watershed function, livestock forage, recreation opportunities, and wildfire mitigation. Because conditions, management goals, and available resources vary substantially across this vast region, land managers face difficult decisions about where, when, and how to invest in actions that will sustain resilient pinyon-juniper ecosystems and the benefits they provide. These challenges underscore the need for collaborative approaches and tools that help managers balance multiple objectives while adapting to future climate conditions.

This webinar highlights complementary efforts that are advancing the science and practice of pinyon-juniper woodland management across the western United States. We first present a climate-informed decision support framework developed through collaboration among researchers, land managers, and stakeholders to support the planning, prioritization, and evaluation of management actions across the Colorado Plateau. We then introduce two biome-scale initiatives led by the Intermountain West Joint Venture: the Pinyon-Juniper Mapping Project (PJMap), which is developing a spatial framework to assess woodland extent, condition, ecological integrity, and management needs across the biome; and the Pinyon-Juniper Management Network (PJMN), a manager-focused community of practice that facilitates knowledge exchange and supports the integration of science and practitioner expertise into management decisions.

Finally, we highlight two place-based efforts that are testing and applying these concepts on the ground: the Pinyon-Juniper Adaptive Silviculture Project in southwestern Colorado, which evaluates how thinning intensity and structural heterogeneity influence drought resilience and wildfire risk, and the Pinyon Community Climate Action (PiCCA) project in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, an interdisciplinary partnership among Tribal Nations, land managers, community organizations, and researchers working to strengthen woodland resilience under future climate conditions. Together, these initiatives demonstrate how collaborative science, manager-focused tools, and adaptive management strategies can help sustain resilient pinyon-juniper ecosystems across the West.