Assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change is a key step in anticipating climate impacts on species. Vulnerability assessments characterize species’ future conservation needs and can guide current planning and management actions to support species persistence in the face of climate change.  A full assessment of climate vulnerability involves characterizing three essential components: sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and exposure. Assessing sensitivity and adaptive capacity, as well as determining which aspects of exposure to assess all require detailed knowledge of species-specific traits and ecology. Such a detailed understanding is hard to come by, even for well-studied species, thus, developing vulnerability assessments for lesser-studied species can be extremely challenging.  Most vulnerability assessment methods and frameworks are developed using well-studied species and their applicability to species with poorly understood traits and ecologies is questionable.  To support climate vulnerability assessments for lesser studied species, this project aims to compile what is known about climate vulnerability from existing models, data, and frameworks into a classification model (typology).  This typology will roughly classify the sensitivity and adaptive capacity of relatively data-poor species, based on known species characteristics and ecological contexts. In an effort to identify resource management agency needs for, and challenges to, developing vulnerability assessments for data-poor species, the research team will specifically: 1) assess the ability of existing data-driven models and data-light frameworks to support vulnerability assessments for data-poor species; 2) develop a classification model based on known species vulnerabilities and basic species attributes; 3) create and test a typology to assess vulnerability for data-poor species; and 4) create a decision tree to provide guidance on how to assess vulnerability for species with varying data availability.

The Great Plains region plays an important role in providing water and land resources and habitat for wildlife and livestock, crops, energy production, and other critical ecosystem services to support rural livelihoods. The semiarid conditions of the region and tight coupling of livelihood enterprises with ecosystem services creates a situation of increased sensitivity to climate changes and enhanced vulnerability among the rural communities and Native American nations across the region. Recent climate conditions associated with warming trends, and altered atmospheric flows have resulted in rapid onset of drought conditions and other extreme weather events across the region that are changing seasonal patterns of temperature and precipitation and warming trends. Projected climate changes provided in the fourth US National Climate Assessment indicate that potential warming and variability of precipitation will further increase drought and extreme weather events. Recent research and assessment efforts of current and projected climate changes in the Great Plains indicate that rural communities and ecosystems are becoming more vulnerable to changes associated with warming trends, droughts, and increased variability in precipitation. These climate changes are having differential impacts on ecosystem services that are critical to livelihood enterprises. Strategies for how resource managers and the research community can better collaborate and more effectively codesign and coproduce efforts to understand and to respond to these challenges are needed.