This summer, seven graduate students joined scientists and natural resource managers to tackle some of the most pressing climate adaptation challenges across the North Central region of the United States. Through the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Rapid Climate Assessment Program (RCAP), the students spent the summer working in interdisciplinary teams on projects ranging from drought and freshwater restoration to changing watersheds and sagebrush conservation. Launched in 2023, RCAP projects are intentionally rapid and collaborative, giving students the opportunity to gain experience in actionable science while helping partners address real-world management needs.

The seven projects varied widely in their focus. One team investigated how future climate and ecological conditions can be better incorporated into species status assessments and wildlife refuge planning, while another explored how managers can respond to the expansion of woody plants into grasslands as climate and other environmental conditions change. For participants, the projects also offered opportunities to work across disciplines and bring new perspectives into applied science. Em Wright, a graduate research assistant with the woody invasion RCAP team, reflected on the value of that experience: “I was surprised to learn that social science is still relatively underutilized in applied science projects, even when they involve human/social dimensions, such as decision-making processes. Given that context, it was rewarding to contribute social science research to this project and to collaborate with a team that valued an interdisciplinary process.”

Other teams examined low-tech freshwater restoration as a climate adaptation strategy in Colorado and new ways of recognizing signals of change in watersheds. Students also explored how grasslands could be restored to better support bison, developed climate adaptation options for eastern sagebrush ecosystems, and investigated whether consecutive dry days could provide another way to understand emerging drought. Together, the projects demonstrate the many forms that climate adaptation science can take and the importance of connecting that science with the people making decisions on the ground. 

For graduate research assistant Sam Ahler, that meant thinking about what it takes to restore an ecosystem capable of supporting one of the Great Plains’ most iconic species: bison. Bison once shaped grasslands across much of North America, but their near-extirpation in the 1800s had profound impacts on prairie ecosystems and Indigenous communities whose livelihoods and cultures were closely tied to them. Today, efforts to restore bison across their native range are also creating a need to restore the diverse grasslands that can support them. Ahler’s RCAP project explored how plant functional traits can help managers select plants for those restored grasslands. Rather than choosing plants based only on which species historically occurred in an area, Ahler and his collaborators considered what those plants needed to do. In particular, they focused on traits that could help plants withstand drought, a major challenge for grassland restoration in short-grass prairies, while also providing adequate forage for bison.

Using a regional pool of species identified through the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Seed Selection Tool, the team evaluated traits and then used those to generate potential species assemblages for seed mixes, including for grasslands supporting bison and hay meadows that could provide supplemental winter forage. The work could soon move from computer models to the landscape. Denver Mountain Parks plans to use the developed seed mix to test the potential for restoring resilient grasslands associated with its bison herds at Daniels Park and/or Genesee Park. The project was also informed by members of the Denver Zoo Great Plains Conservation Program.

While Ahler’s project focused on which plants could help build a more resilient grassland, graduate research assistant Elizabeth Woolner worked on giving land managers a broader set of options for responding to climate change. Her team has spent the past three summers developing an adaptation menu for the eastern sagebrush biome. Woolner describes the idea through a familiar analogy: imagine opening a restaurant menu, except instead of choosing food, you are choosing among ways to help sustain an ecosystem under climate change.

Adaptation menus organize potential climate responses into strategies, approaches, and more specific management actions. For example, instead of an “Appetizers” section, Woolner explains, the sagebrush menu might include a strategy such as “Sustain or restore fundamental ecosystem functions.” Beneath that could be an approach such as “Maintain or restore soil health,” followed by examples of ways managers could put that approach into practice. Just as a restaurant menu does not tell a diner what to order, an adaptation menu does not tell a manager which action to take. Instead, it lays out options that managers can evaluate for their particular landscapes and management goals. That is especially important for the eastern portion of the sagebrush biome, primarily across Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Sagebrush ecosystems are under pressure from climate change, invasive grasses, and other stressors, but eastern sagebrush landscapes have generally been less impacted than other portions of the biome, making them important for maintaining and restoring sagebrush across its range.

For graduate research assistant Kelsey Warren, the subject of her RCAP project was already deeply familiar. Warren grew up along California’s central coast, where she remembers parched grasses fading across hillsides and dozens of days passing without rain. When she joined the RCAP project “Tracking Consecutive Dry Days as a Drought Precursor,” she expected to be studying a phenomenon she already understood. But what she had never done was approach that childhood experience of drought using computational methods. Warren spent the summer developing a proof of concept for a new approach to an existing drought metric: Consecutive Dry Days (CDD). After reviewing commonly used drought metrics, she worked with collaborators to conceptualize and quantify periods of dryness using daily precipitation data. She then developed R (software) scripts to calculate the metric, initially focusing on the Northern Great Plains. The project gave her a new appreciation for something she had known since childhood. “During my time with RCAP, I grew an immense respect for the variety of ways in which scientists and managers currently capture drought. It was both a humbling and rewarding experience to work alongside some of those scientists and managers to explore an emerging lens to understand and view dry spells in the U.S.,” she shares.

By bringing graduate students and natural resource managers together around real-world challenges, RCAP is helping build both the science and the relationships needed to adapt to a changing climate. Congrats to the 2026 cohort and stay tuned for more results!