We used a Bayesian statistical model that includes projections of where people will be located on the landscape and future atmospheric conditions from downscaled climate model simulations using a moderate warming trajectory (RCP 4.5), to make predictions regarding the number, size of the 90% largest fires, and area burned by wildfires in each Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) level-3 ecoregion across the U.S. from 2020-2060

On December 5, 2023, Dr. Christy Miller Hesed (Regional Climate Adaptation Scientist, North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center), in coordination with the Peabody Community Foundation, hosted a community conversation on flooding in Peabody, Kansas. This workshop brought together community leaders, business owners, pastors, agricultural producers, and residents who have experienced flooding of their homes or businesses to share perspectives on environmental change, learn about past and projected precipitation patterns and their implications for flooding, and discuss vulnerability and possible adaptations to flooding in Peabody. The workshop was held at the Peabody-Burns Elementary School. Flooding has been a perennial problem for Peabody, with implications for numerous businesses, residences, and the community as a whole. Projected environmental changes have the potential to exacerbate the consequences of flooding events. Opportunities for improvements in downtown Peabody are currently being pursued with leadership from the Peabody Community Foundation. In addition, some attempts have been made to explore opportunities for reducing the impacts of flooding on Peabody; however, the causes and possible solutions are so complex that flooding remains an unaddressed concern. The goal of the Peabody Community Conversation on Flooding was to bring community members together to develop ideas to inform future resilience to flooding.

As scientists across the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) respond to society’s greatest challenges with 21st century science, they are increasingly recognizing the need to engage with the decision makers, individuals, and communities their science aims to serve. To meet this challenge, USGS projects and programs have generated and utilized a variety of different models, frameworks, processes, and approaches for enabling this engagement through “participatory sciences” (PS). However, these efforts remain disparate, siloed, and ad hoc within project teams, mission areas, regions, or programs, resulting in a lack of access to or awareness of best practices and innovative efforts for scientists in different parts of the Bureau. Therefore, there is a need and an opportunity to synthesize the insights generated by teams working on this challenge across USGS to generate a widely applicable framework and set of resources to aid USGS scientists and programs interested in participatory sciences. In order to develop these resources, the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center is working with Seamus Land on a two-year project through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Engineering. Seamus planned and hosted a workshop to collect input and perspectives in support of the research and development of a PS guidebook. The workshop was held May 5-7, 2025, at the Powell Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The workshop gathered USGS staff and select partners in the Denver/Boulder/Fort Collins region, along with one USGS staff member from Oklahoma, to: Contribute feedback on draft USGS PS products, and Further develop understandings on effective PS by exploring partnerships both with and beyond USGS. Participants included scientists and professionals from the USGS North Central and South Central Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs), Office of Risk and Resilience in the USGS Natural Hazards Mission Area, Community for Data Integration in USGS Core Science Systems Mission Area, Colorado Natural Heritage Program, Climate Change Response Program (CCRP) in the National Park Service (NPS), River Watch, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Colorado State Government, and Division of Decision Support in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Across the three days, participants engaged with a variety of activities homing in on how to characterize PS and discussed existing frameworks that could provide structure to the USGS PS guidebook. The first day focused on USGS participants, the second day centered select local partners, and the final day provided space for the PS advisory committee to discuss successes, growth areas, and next steps.

Across the western United States, pinyon and juniper trees have been spreading into sagebrush and grassland ecosystems. This shift in vegetation affects how these lands are used and valued, especially for activities like livestock grazing and hunting. For decades, land managers have removed pinyon and juniper trees across large areas in an effort to restore native plant communities. What remains unclear is how effective these strategies are—particularly as the climate becomes hotter and drier in many parts of the West. Through this project, we developed a science-based decision-support tool based to help land managers determine where, when, and how to prioritize tree removal projects under future climate. To do this, we brought together resource managers and researchers through a series of workshops to co-create a range of management options for planning, implementing, and evaluating tree removal efforts in sagebrush and grassland ecosystems. The result is a set of adaptive management practices that incorporate future climate conditions and the environmental context of each treatment area—helping ensure more effective and resilient land management.

This is an annotated bibliography covering socioecological transformation in the sagebrush ecosystems of the North Central US region. It was compiled during the 2024 Rapid Climate Assessment Program (RCAP).

The goal of the Working Group Science Synthesis (WGSS) is to inform management for adapting to environmental change in the eastern sagebrush biome (Montana, Wyoming & Colorado). Overarching Theme: Synthesis and evaluation of management strategies and actions to maintain and restore sagebrush ecological integrity in the context of their effectiveness and social acceptance under a changing climate and other emerging stressors.

Grasslands in the northern Great Plains are important ecosystems that support local economies, tribal communities, livestock grazing, diverse plant and animal communities, and large-scale migrations of big game ungulates, grassland birds, and waterfowl. Climate change and variability impact how people and animals live on and interact with grasslands, and can bring more frequent droughts, fires, or new plant species that make managing these landscapes challenging. Understanding how climate change and variability will impact grassland ecosystems and their management in the 21st century first requires a synthesis of what is known across all of these scales and a gap analysis to identify key areas to focus future research. Researchers have addressed this need by conducting a series of synthesis efforts to  (1) identify and describe known management questions and information needs of grasslands managers; (2) assess the state-of-the-science on climate change and variability in the northern Great Plains region; (3) describe ecological responses to climate variability and change across the grasslands, including tipping points, changing fire patterns, spreading invasive species, changing species distributions, habitat fragmentation, and other changes in ecological communities.  This project supports resource managers by providing them with the scientific information needed to make best-practice management decisions about northern Great Plains grasslands and will foster relationships with the conservation and management organizations that will utilize this science to make decisions about public lands.

The US Global Change Research Program website, including pages hosting the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and previous National Climate Assessments, is currently unavailable. However, this tool is still operational and contains links to PDFs of the assessment in the "Sources" section. In addition, you can find links to the entire NCA5 or select chapters here.

This workflow describes the process to visualize and quantify future climate change uncertainty, select plausible and divergent climate scenarios, extract quantitative summaries for a large suite of climate and hydrological metrics for those scenarios, and use various tools available in Climate Toolbox to visualize spatial or temporal trends for the selected scenarios

This app quantifies relationships, based on linear regression, between 'observed' grasslands productivity and different climate variables (that includes precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PET), PET minus precipitation) for a point location in the US Great Plains, and apply those relationships to project grasslands productivity into the future under different climate scenarios. Grassland productivity is quantified as Aboveground Net Primary Productivity (ANPP) which is the total aboveground biomass production during the growing season. For more information on how it is estimated, please refer to Harmann et al. (2020; full citation provided below). This application allows a user to:   Quickly acquire annual time series of 'observed' historical ANPP and climate data for a point location as .csv Select different timescales for climate variables to assess the relationship between ANPP and climate Quantify and visualize the relationship between 'observed' historical ANPP and different climate variables Quantify, visualize and download (data as .csv) annual time series of future projections of climate and ANPP Estimate and visualize projected mean ANPP for a selected future time period and compare it to the historical mean.